Over the years I have had the luck and opportunity to work on many different projects in several different industries. This website presents a few selected projects. My intention is to show not only the depth and completeness of what I can do, but also showcase the breath of tools and techniques that I have been able to use.
I Solve Problems
A Little About Me
I started my professional career as a Mechanical Drafter for Emulation Technologies straight out of High School. I had taken a drafting class my Senior year and fell in love with it. This was right in the middle of the original Dot Com boom and so I had more work than I could handle trying to modernize the back catalog of drawings and components, so they could be added to their new website. As the Dot Com bubble burst, so did most of our customer base, and I was let go along with most of the rest of the company.
While this was going on, the sales manager at Emulation Technologies had decided to start his own business and contacted me to see if I would be interested in doing some contract work for him. I was agreeable and worked for him for a few months on designing and making drawings for the new products he was working on. One day he referred me to the owners of one of his major suppliers who had another customer that was asking for more design and drafting help then they were willing to give. After a quick interview I started working with the founder of Medconx too.
The workload at Medconx quickly grew until it made sense to join them full time. At this stage the company consisted of the founder, a sales guy, and me. Working at a startup was an incredible learning experience! I got to develop products starting from literal napkin sketches and turn them into full products that the customer bought for years.
Medconx focused on custom cable and connector design and manufacturing for minimally invasive disposable medical devices. I was able to design and develop parts that went into everything from arthroscopic radio frequency ablation tools to implantable defibrillators. As part of this I had close contact with our key vendors, created 3D models, assemblies, and drawings and worked on the entire internal lifecycle from incoming inspection though kitting and production and out through final inspection and developing the paperwork trail.
As much fun as Medconx was, some key decisions from the (new) upper management led to its stagnation. Eventually I found an opportunity to work as a contractor at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs working on the National Ignition Facility (a prototype of a fusion reactor). I jumped at the chance to work on something that could so fundamentally change humanities future. There, I was the primary contact between the customer and a small team of young mechanical engineers.
Unfortunately, soon after I started, the funding for the National Ignition Facility was drastically cut and all the contractors were let go. The contracting company I was working for was thankfully able to find new positions for all their displaced workers and so I started working for KLA Tencor. It was only a few months before I was made a good offer to work for KLA Tencor full time as a direct employee.
KLA Tencor was an exciting and fast paced work environment. The tools and technologies that were being developed there were literally setting the groundwork for the next generation of electronics technology. My position was primarily as an interface between the optical, electrical and mechanical engineers and the production department. It was my job to ensure that the documentation was complete, well ordered and properly entered into the system. As part of this I got to work closely with the engineers as they developed the companies next generation of inspection tools and helped them plan and understand the documentation system that was in place.
Eventually I was asked to take on more of the planning and reporting tasks. The team consisted of about a dozen electrical and mechanical engineers designing the frame and interconnecting portions of the inspection tool. My previous design experience allowed me to help the engineers consider the full complexity of their designs and create waterfall-based project plans for each of them. Although I was able to maintain an honest schedule that accurately reflected the status of the team and their deliverables, it was made clear to me that I would not be able to advance without a degree.
So, after the team delivered the frame and all the required documentation, I left KLA Tencor to go to school full time. Originally intending to go for an Electrical Engineering degree I was introduced to programming and took an immediate liking to it. I soon changed my major to Computer Science and excelled in all the classes that I took. I was so enamored with programming that I took a part time job as a lab instructor for the introductory programming course. Helping to teach was way more enjoyable and rewarding than I had expected but also took up way more time than I had expected.
While teaching lab I got to work with many of the instructors in the Computer Science department at Utah State University. At the time, many of the professors were part time professors while being full time developers at Space Dynamics Lab. Through my work with these professors I was able to get a job at Space Dynamics Lab doing software evaluations. This mostly entailed closely studying third party software, understanding what it did, assessing the software on over a dozen objective criteria, and putting our findings in an easily readable report. Basically, we were the Consumer Reports of software.
I am currently employed at Space Dynamics Lab while continuing to go to school full time. My duties at Space Dynamics Lab have shifted though and now I spend my time doing C++ programming. I’m on a small team creating an easy to use interface to allow users to train and run neural networks on any image-based dataset without having to do any programming themselves. I am on track to get by BS in Computer Science by the summer of 2019.