I'm a Full-Stack Software Engineer, capable of developing front-end, server-side and systems-level software using the following technologies:
PHP - a high-level general utility programming language that excels for server-side OOP-based software development.
I've mantained some of my grad school notes accessible here! I'm a fan of material from various online courses, from Robert Shiller's Financial Markets course in Yale (available on iTunesU) and Advanced Machine Learning from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia (available on Coursera)
Let your money do some work (March 2021)- a more thorough ~30 minute read on savings vs investments, power of compounding, retirement and tax-advantaged accounts and opinionated financial strategies. I go over pre vs post-tax contributions, the wonders of long-term compounding on a Health Savings account and using savings as an insurance against life's hurdles vs achieving financial independence through the compounding rate of investments.
Grownup Escapades: Handling Finances (January 2021) - updated look at personal financial management updated 3 years later.
Grownup Escapades: Handling Finances (October 2017) - an introductory guide on how I've gone about managing my investments and allocating my savings/investments ratio across market ETFs/bonds/individual stock allocations. Also important is timing transactions to minimize your tax liabilities - specifically avoiding the short term capital gains tax. Note that this is based on my opinion as a young adult managing finances, and you would have to appropriately balance your risk/profit appropriately as your financial stability requires. Note that as of current, ETrade and Ally Invest have no commission fees on trading!
Pick your battles: Choosing and Learning the “right” Programming Language (August 2018) - a whirlwind tour across various programming languages, garbage collection, tooling (dependency managers, build/package management), async I/O and how to strategically go about picking up a programming language, picking up semantic and syntactic patterns across Object Oriented and Functional Programming spectrums in today's programming landscape. Including some sampler examples of toy code in Swift, Haskell, PHP, Python and many more, demonstrating various concepts!
Stay surfing with SQL: The case for relational databases (July 2016) - a quick run-down of concepts from relational databases and when NoSQL databases - which serve as "manual transmission" data stores may be appropriate/inappropriate.
TermMerge - My Honors ARCH research project - a total ecosystem of applications and third-party accessible microservices for Natural Language Processing.
Roam - An augmented reality game set in a futuristic post-apocalyptic world. Battle your enemies, team up with your friends, scavenge for inventory items and conquer bosses!
WordMerge - A 2-player room-based game where provided a word, players try to come out with a series of phrases to end with a different but same word. This is an aside to my current Natural Language Processing research.
Oracle - A Chrome-based browser extension that intelligently suggested recommendations based on the current content you are viewing.
Visage - A Facebook messenger bot that can communicate with you personally to check your financial status, with your own bank accounts - check your account balance, set goals, reminders and many more!
Ellery/MyFIU Revamp - A student portal web app that hooked up with MyFIU data using a webscraper, which predicted key areas of a student's major that they should immediately tackle or avoid based on their current standing, as well as GPA predictions and the like.
Cambio - A desktop-based web browser that communicated using SMTP/POP3 email protocols instead of HTTP, encrypted with asymmetric key encryption, to combat Cuban government censorship.
SoundStrike - A sight reading app for musicians. Imagine Guitar Hero but with a real guitar, plugged in to a computer, jamming to real music notes and seeing your performance in real-time.
I started programming in Freshman Year of High School, when I got my first personal computer (April 2010). I immediately was mesmerized and got into building graphical desktop apps with Visual Basic.
During my Sophomore Year, I started developing websites and web apps with PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS and using the same web technologies, along with Apache Cordova, to make hybrid mobile apps. I developed a flash game portal website - My Right To Play, similar to NewGrounds and FreeOnlineGames (FOG), hosting only high-quality flash games along with my friend's own built Adobe Flash games. Junior Year of High School, I balanced between redesigning MRTP multiple times along with developing Game Sanctuary's website, backend and mobile app (Game Sanctuary was a family business we developed that directly competed against GameFly's business model). Senior Year of High School, I entered and won engineering competitions for open-source software development, technological debate, web design and mobile app development.
My College years were at first, disappointing but turned highly enjoyable. As I had to redefine who I was from a person who sought external validation to a person who powered through internal inspiration, I was able to turn my grim first years of personal questioning in College to a highly enjoyable experience. Part of this experience is amassing as much programming as I can on my free time - investing in improving my ugly PHP code skills during Freshman year, learning Javascript, the NodeJS ecosystem and various libraries/frameworks like Angular my Sophomore Year and picking up intensive Database and Big Data/Software architecture scaling principles as well as best application practices in Python on my Junior Year. In my classes, I was able to pickup Java, C, F# and Prolog, applying some of them even in my own personal projects. Nowadays, I am bent on picking up Haskell.
I have also come to lose 90 pounds within 4 months back in May 2012-September 2012 through a rigorous commitment to exercise and eating right. It was a core experience that has helped define my personality to today.
