— My story —
The long way here.
From a GPA under 1.0 to leading engineering on a platform that moves real money. Ten chapters, in order, the way it actually happened.
- i.
1995
Prince Frederick, Maryland
I was born in Calvert County, Maryland. My father spent more than 30 years as a network engineer, so I grew up surrounded by computers and was taking them apart long before I understood what was inside. Neither of my parents had a college degree. I would be the first in my home to earn one.
- ii.
2013 to 2016
The first try
I graduated from Centennial High School in 2013 and started at Georgia Perimeter College that fall. It did not go well. I failed classes, landed on academic probation, and eventually sat out on academic exclusion with a GPA under 1.0. By most measures, that was where the story should have ended.
- iii.
2013 to 2019
Learning to work
So I worked. A car wash. Waiting tables. Personal training on the side, then Life Time Fitness. None of it was software, but all of it was the job: show up on time, read the person in front of you, earn their trust, and take care of them. I still use those skills every day, in every client call and code review.
- iv.
2019
Going back
In spring 2019 I landed my first tech job, a software developer role at CWT Industries writing VB.NET, without a degree. It was not the right fit and only lasted two months, but it proved I could get in the door. That summer I finished a data analytics boot camp, and that fall I went back to school, this time married and raising three kids. Within months I was a Systems Operator at Intralot, keeping live lottery servers running around the clock, and a Teaching Assistant in Georgia Tech's coding boot camps.
- v.
2020
Dean's List
Spring 2020: a 3.75 term and the Dean's List, from the same student the system had already written off. I joined Blockchain at Georgia State and later became its president, and I started substitute teaching full stack and data science boot camps at Georgia Tech, teaching the material I was still mastering myself.
- vi.
2021 to 2023
The Mailchimp door
After two to three years of applying, I earned a Systems Engineering Internship at Mailchimp and rotated through every systems team before landing in core infrastructure. It turned into a full-time offer as a Data Engineer II, which I started in July 2022, before my degree was even conferred. Proof that it could be done.
- vii.
Dec 2022
The degree
I finished my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at Georgia State, three years after walking back in. First-generation graduate, working full time, teaching part time, three kids at home. The odds said no. I did it anyway.
- viii.
2023 to 2026
Betting on myself
A senior colleague who left for Coinbase told me to build in blockchain while it was still early. I co-founded Project Pi Labs, raised a $250K seed round, and shipped Pi Pools, a staking protocol that cut the entry minimum in half and served thousands of users. We later spun out Liquid Agent, an AI money app, after a demo on stage in Las Vegas.
- ix.
2025 to now
Leading engineering
Today I am Tech Lead at SoonPay, a platform that sends money from the US to families in East Africa. I built the iOS and Android app, the web app, most of the API and the ledger that tracks every dollar, and I keep it running in production.
- x.
Now
Building my own thing
Now I build custom software for people with real problems to solve: web apps, APIs, payments, AI agents and the infrastructure under them. Everything from scratch, no templates. If you have an idea, let's build it.
