About Me

Education

I started college at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas in the fall of 2017 and completed my degree in May 2021. I earned a B.S. in Computer Science with an AI/ Machine Learning focus and a minor in mathematics. During my time at SMU I was part of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity as well as the rocketry club and the robotics club.

Clubs

During my time at SMU, I had the opportunity to join two clubs that aligned with my interests. Through these I was able to explore topics I was interested in that were not part of my curriculum and meet like minded people and do some pretty cool stuff.

Robotics Club

I joined the robotics club my Junior year at SMU as a member of the software team. We were building a very large hexacopter to compete in a DARPA competition for UAVs. The high level goal was to build a drone that can receive a mission-plan in a standardized json format as a series of gps waypoints as well as the gps locations of various obstacles that may or may not be in the flight path. The drone would then need to autonomously navigate the mission plan while avoiding the obstacle points and then deploy a smaller rover to complete additional tasks. My job was to build the interoperability system that takes the mission plan from the competition api, converts it to a flight plan the drone can follow while also plotting the course around the obstacles (their location and size were known upon receiving the mission plan). I was successful in creating these two systems, however they were never put to use in competition because of some catastrophic failures of the drone’s frame (3d printed motor mounts) during testing. I was not part of the robotics club during my senior year because of my course workload - I was taking several graduate level classes as well as some extra classes I was interested in.

Obstacle Avoidance Algorithm: Determine where obstacles (cylinders) will intersect with the direct path between the drone and each waypoint. Where it intersects, take the radius r of the cylinder and draw a square around the obstacle with side length of 2r + 5 extra feet added such that 2 diagonal corners of the square are parallel to the direct flight path to the waypoint. Next, calculate the distance to travel if placing a waypoint at each corner of the square from which the diagonal line is perpendicular to the direct flight path, and choose the corner that produces the shortest flight path overall.

Mustang Rocketry

I joined the rocketry club during my freshman year as a founding member with 2 seniors and 2 juniors. I had dabbled in amateur rocketry in high school, so I wasn’t completely lost - but we were building a rocket to compete in a competition for the 10,000 ft category so everything was much larger than I was used to. After my freshman year, I became the team lead for the avionics team as well as payload design. For the avionics, I lead the design, building, and testing of the separation system to deploy the rocket’s drogue and main chutes as well as the radio communications for data downlink to our base station. The payload I designed was meant to test a semi-novel ad-hoc network protocol / topology, but I was never able to build and test this system. Our full scale rocket never flew in competition during my time at SMU due to various issues with manufacturing the solid rocket motor and the exhaust cone. I still learned a ton and had a great time testing and building cool systems with cool people and leading a team.

Hobbies

Honestly I have too many hobbies. At first, most started out as subtle interests that I was drawn towards, but over time many have grown and intersected in ways I would not have expected at the beginning. Many of my projects have grown from my hobbies, and deepened my interest in the underlying subject.

Flying

I earned my private pilot’s license during the summer after my Junior year of high school. It is one of the most fulfilling hobbies out there, and is my favorite thing in the world to do. Becoming a pilot taught me how to multitask well and remain cool, calm, and collected in high stress / high stakes situations. Pursuing my license is one of the best decisions I have ever made. I have kept up my currency so that I can still legally fly, however during college and after I have not flown nearly as much as I would like. This is mainly because of time, access to a plane, and cost - but I have plans to get back in the saddle and remain there in the near future. I do have a high performance rating, and plan to pursue and instrument rating upon my return into regular flying.

Outdoors

Along with flying, if there was something else I wish I could do much more often it would be snow skiing. It is one of my favorite activities in the world, but snow is hard to come by in Dallas, Texas. I also love playing golf. I was on my high school golf team and still play a fair amount today, with a little less competition and a little more fun.

Tinkering

I have always loved building things and tinkering with electronics and computers so I have many microcontrollers and raspberry pis laying around from old projects or actively deployed in current projects (some of which you can find in the projects section). My love of tinkering brought me into the world of computing and software, and eventually led me to build my own computer, and collect old computers - all of which have become a part of my hodge-podge homelab where I run a few services for my local network and some for workflows in airflow. If you read the above section on the rocketry and robotics clubs, you might have noticed an interest in radios and RF theory. I’ve always found that world fascinating, and dipped my toe into it with several iterations of RTL-SDRs, but still have yet to get a HAM license. I have put less focus on this area in the past because there was no clear objective or application I wanted to use it for- just a general curiosity, but recently I have begun to dive deeper into signals processing theory and have some stretch goals/applications I want to reach for in the future so I will be putting more of an emphasis on this area going forward.

Cooking

I started to get into cooking during college. I very quickly realized the difference it makes when using fresh herbs in a recipe versus storebought or dried herbs. This ultimately led me to get into gardening, and began my journey down the rabbit whole of trying to build an automated garden- from which I can grow (some of) my own food. There is something extremely satisfying about eating a dish made entirely from ingredients I grew from seed over several months to harvest. Cooking with food I produce myself led me to ask the question “What is the minimum amount of space you need to completely sustain a person indefinitely, and how can such a space be designed to easily scale by simply inputting the number of people the space needs to support?” That question has become the ‘moonshot’ goal of the garden project.