About Me

I grew up in the southeastern United States, and a lot of my early life was split between two kinds of exploring. One was outside: fishing, wandering around the neighborhood creek, climbing over rocks, and finding little places that felt bigger than they probably were. The other was on a computer. Seeing RuneScape for the first time as a kid did something permanent to my brain. It made games feel less like toys and more like worlds someone had figured out how to build.

That curiosity never really stayed in one lane. I wanted to know why some PC games worked and others did not, what parts mattered inside a computer, and what could be made from old electronics that were already broken. I was the kid taking apart TV remotes and turning the pieces into “things” before I had any real vocabulary for engineering. Later, sports, music, leadership roles, and college in Jacksonville added different pieces to the same pattern: I was always trying to understand systems and find a way to build inside them.

My path through school was not perfectly linear. I had a music scholarship, considered nursing, thought constantly about business, and kept coming back to technology and markets. By the time I graduated, fintech felt like the clearest intersection of all of it. A professor told me to learn Python, so I did. Then I started learning Swift on an old MacBook I had upgraded just to keep alive. This was before AI coding tools made experimentation feel instant, so every small win felt earned.

Professionally, I found myself at FIS, where that builder mindset became useful fast. I worked in implementation support and project-management-heavy roles, but I kept looking for places where software could reduce friction. I used Power Platform tools to automate manual work, lighten heavy processes, and make the job less dependent on brute force. That experience made it obvious to me that the best tools are not always the flashiest ones. They are the ones that remove pain from real work.

The University of Central Florida’s Financial Technology program became the real launchpad. I got stronger with Python, data, and development fundamentals, then AI-assisted coding opened the door to learning much faster. Career Chat was one of the first projects where everything clicked for me: conversation design, structured data, AI roles, product thinking, and a user experience that made career exploration feel more personal. I graduated in the top 15% of my class, pursued a startup competition, and came away much more interested in full-stack development than I expected.

Today, my work still sits at the intersection of finance, data, automation, and product thinking. I audit customer and partner financials, look for revenue recovery, and try to support teams with tools that make them faster and more precise. The throughline is pretty simple: I like complicated systems, I like making them clearer, and I like building things that give people leverage.