Before the workshop,
there was this.

I was hired as UrbanLogic's very first full-time employee — a big leap from every role I'd had before it. Almost overnight I went from being one engineer on a team to holding a senior, leadership position: managing other engineers, several of them in a different time zone on the other side of the world. That adjustment was rough at first — early mornings, late nights, a lot of trial and error in how to communicate and hand off work cleanly — but I kept adjusting, kept working, kept growing, and it settled into a rhythm. We're in a genuinely good flow now.

As the senior full-stack engineer, I own the whole lifecycle: planning and writing the tickets, implementing them, testing them, reviewing other people's code, deploying, and being the one who gets paged when something breaks in production and has to fix it on the fly. I keep our databases organized, correct, and sane as the product grows. I've also set up a long list of third-party integrations from scratch — Stripe for payments, Google's address autocomplete, Google Analytics, Google reCAPTCHA, PandaDoc, Mailtrap, and OneApp, among others.

Being employee #1 at a startup means there's no ramp-up period — you're expected to start pulling real weight immediately, so that's what I did: learned on the fly, kept improving, kept working hard. I've been fortunate to have a great boss and a phenomenal technical consultant who's mentored me throughout and is always there when I need him.

I started studying computer science before large language models were a mainstream thing, which forced me to actually learn the fundamentals — and then, right as I was finding my footing, ChatGPT and the wave of AI tools that followed arrived. I saw early what they'd become and started learning to use them immediately (I was telling friends about ChatGPT within a couple of days of its public release, back in December 2022). When people say "vibe coding" like it's a punchline, I laugh a little — I've effectively been doing it for years without a name for it, and I think it's simply the direction engineering is heading: every engineer becomes an AI-assisted engineer, whether they call it that or not.

AI is part of how I build every day now — Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Jev, Muse, Grok, whatever's out there, I've tried it and folded it into the workflow. Tools like Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT have been part of building both hcleanz and Nap York, and I'm constantly picking up whatever comes next.

In from the start.

That’s a real message, timestamped two days after ChatGPT’s public release — me, telling friends this was worth paying attention to. I started learning computer science before any of this existed, which meant the fundamentals came first. But the moment the tools arrived, I was already in.

When people say it like an insult, I laugh — it’s just where the work is headed.

Computer Science · GPA 3.3