I wrote my first program in BASIC on a Commodore 64, and I loved it. This was long before code editors, so I spent hours hunting syntax errors by eye, and my ten-year-old attention span eventually lost the argument. A summer program in junior high pulled me back in, teaching low-resolution graphics in BASIC, and I finished with the most detailed project in the class. Still no code editors, though.
Then I spent ten years as a professional truck driver.
Driving paid the bills, but it wasn't satisfying the part of me that wants to build and design and improve things. I tried teaching myself Java in my spare time, but learning complicated coding languages didn't mesh well with 14 hour days. So I decided to go to school full time. My partner agreed to carry our household while I did it.
I started in Computer Science, then switched to Cybersecurity in my final year. Public AI tools had just landed and nobody could say yet what that meant for the stability of software development, so I hedged toward security. Coding is still my first love, and the concentration turned out to be the best accident of my education: it handed me the governance and risk vocabulary that most developers never pick up.
Give me time and access to a system and I will come back with more ideas than you asked for. I have a real passion for efficiency and, to the ongoing dismay of everyone who knows me, a sincere enthusiasm for making sure the rules get followed.
That's the honest summary of half of what I'm good at.
The other half is governance. I like compliance work in a way that surprises people. Mapping controls, running maturity assessments, translating a technical finding into something a stakeholder can actually act on: all of that is genuinely satisfying to me.
The trucking years weren't wasted, either. Ten years of federally regulated, safety-critical work with no supervisor looking over your shoulder teaches you what operational reliability actually costs.
On the side I run Uncommon Jars, a small preserves business. I built the brand and the site, and I handle the regulatory side, which under Arkansas cottage food rules is stricter than people expect. It has made the compliance half of my degree considerably less abstract.
