Praxis

I got into computers the usual way for my generation: taking machines apart, modding games, and working out why the thing that should work didn't. The NSCC IT Programming diploma (2024–2026, with honours) formalized that instinct — two years of turning "I can probably figure this out" into software other people can read, extend, and rely on.

The path wasn't direct. Before IT Programming, I completed a Paralegal Services diploma at NSCC — research-heavy training in legal documents and structured argument. Software and law overlap more than people expect: both reward precise reading, evidence-based reasoning, and the patience to follow a chain of logic to its conclusion. Reading a specification with the same care a paralegal reads a contract turns out to be quietly useful — and the same instinct shows up in code review, debugging, and architecture decisions.

The range runs from C++ data structures and external merge sorts at one end to Astro, React, and TypeScript on the web at the other, with PySide6 desktop work in between. The common thread is caring what the machine is actually doing. The clearest example is a hobby that got out of hand: I tune a single GPU node on Einstein@Home's gravitational-wave search the way other people tune project cars — currently around 6.2 million credits a day, a 3.5× gain that came from diagnosing a Windows driver-model bottleneck rather than buying hardware. There's a paper.

The obvious answer is wrong more often than it should be. The real one is usually a layer deeper.

The proof I enjoy this is what I build when nobody assigns it: a gothic browser RPG that fits in a single HTML file, a Portal-themed chat interface for open-source LLMs, this site. I like systems that function — but I ship things people actually want to poke at.

What I'm looking for is straightforward: a team where honest assessment is the default, decisions get documented, and asking the person who already solved the problem counts as engineering skill rather than weakness — that habit has paid off for me more than any single technology. The coursework is done. The building isn't.