Welcome to my Website!

Hey there! Welcome to my little slice of the internet! This is where I nerd out about programming projects, share some of my favorite amateur photos, and ramble about life as an Army vet turned CS student. Stick around for some cool stuff and maybe a laugh or two.

That's me in Afghanistan circa (2016)... Bernie in a chair was added in after the fact


And here's a pic of my 1973 BMW motorcycle

And here's my cat, having decided that one of my motorcycle repair manuals was in fact her bed.

About me

Oh god, where to even begin here? Well, let's see, I got into programming somewhat later in life. After graduating high school in 2011, I joined the army as a 13F - more formally known as a Fire Suport Specialist, more coloquially known as a Forward Observer, or FO - this is obviously not why you're here, so I won't bore you too much with the details. Just remember artillery, air strikes, that sort of thing. Calling in that sort of stuff was kind of the main point of my MOS (we also did a lot of work with communications equipment... still have nightmares about some of the DOD's bad software & networking practices). But in any case, I took my first Computer Science course on a whim while taking college courses online on deployment. They tell you you'll have so much free time for classes when you're deployed. But boy oh boy is that not the case. Anyways, I took my first steps into programming and absolutely fell on my face. Like it wasn't even funny how badly that went... ok, maybe it was a little funny. But in any case, from there I'd sort of come to the conclusion that maybe the field of computer science wasn't for me. Though in hindsight, it might've just been the environment in which I was learning material that was brand new to me. The 13 hour time-difference between myself and the professors definitely didn't help either - still have fond memories of having to take a proctored midterm at 1 AM local time and having to go on mission at 7. Fun times.

So, after getting out of the Army and returning to Michigan, I began attending classes at Grand Rapids Community College; and I started to feel a renewed interest towards coding and the Computer Science field. So I figured it was time for attempt #2. Given the fact that I would have access to the professors during my daylight hours, as well as the fact that I could phyiscally go and talk to them if I had issues (the things we take for granted, right?), I thought that success the second time around might be a bit more easily achievable. And boy am I sure glad that I made that second attempt! Since those initial CIS classes at GRCC, I've gone on to declare a double major in Computer Science and Cybersecurity at Grand Valley State University, publish a few mobile applications, build various web and software solutions for friends' and family's businesses, and along the way I've even managed to make some really good friends and find some amazing restaurants in the West Michigan-area. So, like I said, really glad that I made that second attempt.


Skills

Programming Projects

Github


Some of my more interesting school projects


Dr. Al's Parenting Tips & Tools

iOS

Android (temporarily unavailable)

Websites

CruZin Auto

Amateur Photography

Check out some of my awesome shots


As a requirement for my Computer Science degree at Grand Valley, I had to take an art elective. After spending way longer than I'd like to admit considering Edo-Period Japanese Literature, I instead landed on photography. While part of it was to settle an art requirement, my original fascination with photography stemmed from my deployment to Afghanistan in 2016/2017. After buying a cheap little Canon Powershot on a whim in Kuwait, I proceeded to take close to 3,000 pictures during my 9-month stay in Kabul - and I would say about 30 of them turned out really, really well.

This in turn led to a sort of lingering curiosity over what determined whether a photo was good or not. I figured that surely there must be some way to objectively determine whether a photograph is good or not, right? But, after returning from deployment and transitioning out of the Army, and not really having much time to explore such things, that curiousity ended up being relegated to a fleeting thought I'd occasionally have while stuck in traffic or out on a run. But, in finding that I would need to take an art course of some sort, and seeing that Intro to Photography was on the list, I figured I would seize the opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of photography - and this is the end result.


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And what better way to show off photography and programming skills than to make a little slide-y image viewer for my personal website? Now pretty early on, I had a rough idea of what I wanted this to look like; and Blaze Slider got pretty close to what I was looking for right out of the box. The only real drawback was most of the documentation and examples I could find about Blaze Slider seemed to indicate that it was designed for the image paths to be hard-coded in - and I pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to do that. So, with Blaze Slider and a little bit of PHP on the backend, I managed to configure this website so that it could create HTML elements for whatever images it finds in a given directory, programatically create divs for each individual image, and then initialize Blaze Slider after all of the images/divs have been added in. To be honest, I spent way too much time on what amounts to a fairly minor component of this website (feels like there's a lot of sunken-cost fallacy involed in coding amirite?). But I think the end result is pretty neat... if a bit choppy at times. But at the very least, all I have to do is add and delete photos in the specified directory if I want to change up what photos are in the image slider. So that's pretty nice.

Contact information

Socials


Contact Info