glad you could make it

Hey, my name is Alan. I'm a software engineer, these days focusing on backend and applied AI by career, game development by hobby. I like to write about what I learn and track my journey so I decided to create this website.

A little bit about my story:

My first foray into software development began in university, actually. I think that's pretty late for most diehard programmers, but before that my only experience was tweaking config scripts for video games and just learning power user tricks on Windows machines from being a PC gamer growing up and just naturally having a heavy amount of PC usage. I didn't know that my highschool (the same one Paul Graham went to!) offered a AP computer science java bootcamp class. I did however manage to install and run Ubuntu as a kid once on a piece of shit Toshiba laptop but promptly noped out after some time, bash was still too difficult for me and I didn't get much past copy pasting commands from tutorials I found online. Switching to Linux in the aughts as a kid seems scary to me in retrospect knowing how little I knew as a kid, but I guess I felt it was a stay-in-the-burning-building-or-die-trying kind of thing with Windows Vista at the time.

Oh yeah, I actually got into programming by accident. I arrived to the University of Pittsburgh after having only applied there and nowhere else because I was really dumb as a kid and didn't want to think about my future. I'm so grateful I got in, because I don't know what would have happened to me if I didn't. My major was effectively undecided during orientation week and a conversation I had with highschool friends I rendezvoused with led me to trying Computer Science out as a major. They said it would be really cool and fun. By the time we were entering our junior year, they'd both dropped out of the major while I was just falling in love with the field. I actually ended up double majoring in Computer Science and Premedicine at the same. I did that because at the time I didn't know what I wanted to do, follow my father and be a physician like my mother desperately wanted, or be a software engineer.

After graduating, I continued volunteering and collecting clinical experience, but things just never felt right. I realized that I didn't like the work lifestyle that comes with being someone that works in a hospital or clinic and decided to "pivot" back to software. I got hired at a small company where I was immediately thrusted into a position where I could have tons of impact, not really by choice. It was a sort of George Washington kind of situation except I was way less experienced- at least he won a war before they made him be president. I had no accomplishments of my own by this point. The whole thing was quite stressful, I felt like I didn't know what I was doing. I knew I wanted this kind of control and impact level, but I hated feeling so inadequate and self-teaching could only get me so far. I decided to enroll in masters programs for software engineering.

I got accepted! To Carnegie Mellon University, a highly esteemed school known for their computer science and tech programs. This was a huge relief to me at the time, I didn't expect to get in anywhere. Maybe being from Pittsburgh helped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

During my time at CMU, I worked an internship at the Aerospace Corporation. Nice huge org, but a little too bureaucratic for my taste. I did a capstone experience with Troutwood where I worked in a team of five to build an AI chatbot named Finn to live inside of their app. I had never been more impassioned to work on something before in my life. It was the perfect intersection of technical intrigue (this is when the AI boom just started), impact on helping real life users, and to top it off, my request to be the AI lead on the project was accepted.

I think my passion to build something amazing was really showing during that time because Troutwood seemed to notice and extended a full time offer. Since then, I've been working at Troutwood on applied AI services and general backend work.