In my junior year of high school I took a programming class that changed my life forever. Outside of class I started making my first game, Galactic Wing. While sharing my development progress with my classmates, I saw them light up in a way that made me realize what I wanted to with my life. I knew then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life making things that made people that excited and happy.
With my dream so clear to me, I wanted to waste as little time as possible. I decided to go to college early and enrolled in Clarkson University’s The Clarkson School, a selective program that allowed me to fully attend my freshman year of college while finishing high school. I was also admitted to the Honors Program at the end of my freshman year. Clarkson didn’t have a game development major, so I worked with advisors to build my own and double majored in Computer Science and Digital Arts & Sciences. This gave me both the technical and theoretical education to build my own games while nurturing me as an artist, designer, and teller of stories. A highlight for me was taking two game design classes taught by Brenda Romero, where I was able to work with a team to design a tabletop RPG, The Body of the Beast and take a Narrative Game Design class where I discovered just how incredibly passionate I am about building powerful, meaningful narratives in games.
For the latter two years of college I worked on a game called Dimension, which I incorporated into independent studies, my Digital Arts & Science capstone, and my Honors thesis.
In May of 2018, I graduated from the Clarkson University Honors Program with a double major in Computer Science and Digital Arts & Sciences and a minor in Mathematics.
From May of 2018 to August of 2018 I was independently contracted to develop a mobile version of a board game in Unity, but the project was ultimately cancelled.
In August of 2018, I started working at Gracenote, a Nielsen company, where I worked for over 2 years on their entertainment industry data platform that powers the streaming services, satellite and cable, and box office systems with schedules and metadata. I worked hard to prove myself worth hiring, learned a lot about full stack development (in a Java heavy stack), and led new projects as our team shifted from on-premises architecture & infrastructure to the cloud. I spent about a year templating our infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform, and reconfiguring many of our applications to be better suited for CI/CD. It was an incredible learning experience and I left that job with a much greater understanding of software development, design, architecture, and deployment.
In April of 2019, I met my wife Nicole and we started dating shortly after. We both shared an immense love for games, and I started to play older games I had never gotten the chance to play because of her. Her sharing her love for The Legend of Zelda, Kingdom Hearts, and Sly Cooper with me reinvigorated my passion for games and gave me new inspiration for the games I wanted to make.
In August of 2020, we started a Twitch channel, RadiantGardeners, together to share our love for gaming and to give people a positive and safe place to be. In January of 2021, we started uploading videos to YouTube under the same name. Content creation has brought us so many incredible opportunities to challenge ourselves, laugh at ourselves, celebrate the games we love, and grow our public speaking ability and comfort talking to other people.
In May of 2021, I started working at Kinotek where the seed funding still hadn’t hit the bank and the product was still in alpha. It was a pretty big risk, but to me it was an even bigger opportunity to test myself and grow myself. I’ve often referred to it as “battle testing my ego”, and I’m glad I pushed myself to know whether or not I was capable of something rather than just imagine that I probably am.
When I joined Kinotek, I was the most experienced software engineer on the team, and the only one with industry experience. I brought everything I had learned from my time at Gracenote and helped shape the software development and feedback-driven development processes, I rebuilt the API, and split the product from a Unity build into a React web app, a serverless backend data processing ETL pipeline, and a BablyonJS 3D visualization layer. After those changes we were able to iterate faster and deploy more reliably. I established CI/CD pipelines for the different parts of the stack and templated our infrastructure so that everything was documented in code. One of my proudest achievements was leading a migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL, which better fit our data and provided us with huge performance improvements, and the team was able to complete the migration cleanly within a month. I like to attribute this to three things: my team working incredibly well together and individually, my relentless organization and preparation in order to give the team an opportunity to succeed each day, and having a small enough database that we weren’t trying to move mountains. There’s so much I can say about working at Kinotek because it is such a huge part of my life and filled with so many incredible accomplishments and even more failures. Ultimately, I’m grateful to myself for taking the less secure path and allowing myself to train and grow in so many different ways.
In June of 2023, I married the love of my life, Nicole. We had an incredible wedding filled with video game music played by a lovely string quartet and many other nerdy details (like Zelda and Link Amiibo as our cake topper). We’re enjoying married life and looking to keep pushing ourselves to chase our dreams and enjoy life to the fullest.