After nearly a year at Fort Benning, I returned to my unit, the 181st Infantry Regiment of the Massachusetts National Guard. The first drill upon returning from OSUT is usually with the Recruit Sustainment Program (RSP), not one’s unit. It is a debrief, of sorts. There, I was awarded a…

On January 28, 2019, I boarded a flight from Boston to Atlanta to attend Army basic training and advanced individual training (AIT) at Fort Benning, GA. My target MOS was 11B (Infantryman). …

A day after the 382nd anniversary of the National Guard’s founding, I enlisted in the original unit: the 181st Infantry Regiment. It is the oldest continuously-active and oldest combat unit in the Americas, founded in 1636 as the Massachusetts Bay Colony Militia. Each “year” in this series represents the cumulative…

Started from the front-end now we’re here. — TL;DR Starting as a front-end developer, I studied back-end development on the side until a work opportunity allowed me to demonstrate the skill. HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery, and MODX. Those were the technologies I primarily used as a web developer for a small digital marketing firm. I was self-taught, using…

I didn’t have a CS degree and I didn’t go through a bootcamp. — TL;DR I used LinkedIn Learning pathways to learn enough web development to start an unpaid internship. I worked there until I had enough skills to justify being paid. In early 2015, I was working overnight shifts at a substance abuse recovery center―something between inpatient treatment and a halfway house. I…

It all started with an Apple Macintosh II… or was it the Macintosh Classic II? I was about four years old. I don’t remember the circumstances, but basic typing skills were introduced at my school. Exposure to Windows 95 and 98 followed. At 12, I gained access to a Dell…

The purpose of this document is to articulate considerations, tools, and methodologies for UI architectures with regard to the code, UI design, and project management. The most up-to-date version of this document can be found on my GitHub and allows for certain formatting niceties for structuring the content compared to…

Be loyal to a trust, act promptly, do things. — My unit, part of the 181st Infantry Regiment, issued an assignment to its soldiers to read A Message to Garcia (1899). …

When planning to augment a technology infrastructure, it's not enough to take existing systems and “just add water”— the water being microservices and containers. I’ve worked on projects where containerizing existing apps was seen as a major breakthrough, while a rebuild from the ground-up after years of iterative add-ons was…