Blog Posts

The full journey, from Day 1 to Google and beyond.

2026

Four Years From Day 1

March 1, 2026

The plan from my first blog post vs. what actually happened. A four-year retrospective.

First Performance Review: Outstanding Impact

February 10, 2026

Top 27% of engineers at my level. The band teacher did alright.

Coming Home to NYC

January 15, 2026

Transferring from Ads to Cloud to move back to Queens after a year in Massachusetts.

2025

Holly's Schedule Maker: The Web App (Part 3)

November 15, 2025

22 groups, constraint satisfaction, 18 failed algorithms, and 162 torture tests. The schedule maker grows up.

Side Projects & The GeminiFit Coach

October 15, 2025

Building a fitness app with Android, Strava, Health Connect, and Gemini AI.

NYC Five Boro Bike Tour

May 10, 2025

36.7 miles through all five boroughs, one year after learning to ride a bike.

Building an AI Agent That Saved 400 Hours

October 1, 2025

AI agents that automated months of legacy migrations, an IDE extension, and going back to Queens College.

Finding My Footing at Google

March 10, 2025

Shipping real code, fighting imposter syndrome, and discovering that teaching is a superpower.

2024

Noogler: My First Weeks at Google

December 20, 2024

Day one at Google — the Noogler hat, the onboarding, and the city-sized codebase.

The Google Interview Gauntlet

November 15, 2024

Two technical interviews, a gut-punch rejection, and the offer call that changed everything.

Hack Knight: One Last Hackathon Before Google

November 10, 2024

Got a verbal Google offer at 8:51 AM, won Best Education Track by midnight. Not a bad Saturday.

My First Tech Internship: VegBoom

August 20, 2024

Building a full-stack app from concept to pre-launch in my first professional engineering role.

From Zero to Metric Century in Two Months

September 1, 2024

Half century, metric century, Coney Island, a crash, and 1,400 miles in five months.

Learning to Bike at 26

July 15, 2024

Fred from Queens College convinced me to try cycling. My first ride was 0.7 miles.

Degree Complete. HackCUNY Champion.

February 15, 2024

Two bachelor’s degrees and a hackathon win in the span of a month.

2023

Holly's Schedule Maker: The Java GUI (Part 2)

September 15, 2023

Rebuilding the schedule maker with Java Swing so Holly can just download a JAR and run it herself.

Senior Year & The Home Stretch

September 15, 2023

Final semester of CS, tutoring, and preparing for the job market.

CUNYFirst Course Enroller: My First Real Project

May 20, 2023

Automating course enrollment with Python, Selenium, and a Discord bot serving 60+ users.

2022

Conquering Math, One Semester at a Time

December 15, 2022

Grinding through CS prerequisites, freelancing for schools, and finding my rhythm.

Holly's Schedule Maker: The Python Prototype (Part 1)

October 15, 2022

Three months into learning to code and I told Holly I could automate her schedule. My first real project.

Goodbye, Mr. Robles

September 1, 2022

Leaving the classroom after three years — the hardest and most necessary decision.

CS50 Week 2

July 8, 2022

Arrays, deeper into C, and more debugging adventures.

CS50 Week 1

July 8, 2022

Learning C the hard way — Mario, Cash, Credit, and Luhn’s Algorithm.

Day 1 — The Journey Begins

February 24, 2022

July 7th, 2022 — the plan, the fear, and the first step.

My Start

February 24, 2022

My journey from RuneScape to Google — how a music teacher found his way back to programming.