I am a graduate of Blue Branch's Trades Ready Modular Program, which is made of a 4-week intro period plus a 4-week work placement at Now Housing (a modular home construction company). The program is a "trades crash course" which takes people with little prior experience and makes them work-ready.
I built a 14-foot wide shed, which involved carpentry, wood and steel framing, insulation, interior and exterior trim (aluminum and vinyl), and steel roofing. There were specific introductions for plumbing, electrical work, welding, and HVAC.
More broadly, the program covered general tool use, precise measurements, blueprint creation and reading, and safety training:
I'm familiar with videography, photography, and graphic design and I can write and edit text for the eye or the ear.
I have used LibreOffice extensively for personal work - organizing projects, writing stories and blogs, and sharing documents online. I'm also a Microsoft Office Specialist in Word and Excel.
I went to college for journalism because I enjoyed learning about new things and I wanted to write without being a starving artist. In hindsight, this was not a smart idea - but I still learned to interview people, write many different types of articles, and create/edit content for the college newspaper, website, and radio station.
I got an internship at the magazine Alternatives Journal, and after that I nearly scored a good job at an agricultural magazine - but there is no room for new blood in the magazine industry.
I went back to college to switch my skills into computer programming, graduating from a software engineering program in 2020. Obviously the pandemic made it hard to find work, and it took me 2 years of job searching before I got anything concrete.
I worked at a company called Conexiom as a "Connection Developer", which meant I told a computer system how to read information from PDFs and text files, then send the output to a vendor's inventory system. This required a lot of high-order logical thinking to recognize patterns [address, city, state] rather than getting hung up on literals [123 Main St W, New York, New York].
It was a good place and I learned a lot - collaborating with remote teams, working with extremely specialized proprietary software, solving problems while meeting quotas - but the company underwent multiple waves of layoffs in late 2022-2023.
However, an entrepreneurship/networking group I was in introduced me to the Shaolin AI AI/ML course, which was very promising. After 24 weeks I emerged with a working knowledge of many topics that had been totally arcane to me before.
Shaolin isn't a typical boot camp - the pace of learning is much faster, and we don't do rote exercises from a book. I was exposed to the entire spectrum of AI/ML theory and history, and I did practical work on every part of it.
Have a look at my Projects to see what I've accomplished.
I love to read and write, and some of my favorite novels are Watership Down, The Hobbit, and Brian Jacques's Redwall adventures.
I'm an avid gamer as well, especially tabletop RPGs. I got my start playing Dungeons & Dragons like many people, but my favorite systems are Feng Shui and Shadows Over Sol. If you know either system, you are a true connoisseur and you have my respect.
Of course I play video games too, mostly fighting games like old Guilty Gear for hardcore style and action, and newer indie games for novel experiences. I actually enjoy contributing to wiki pages for games I play frequently - there's an entire community of people who enjoy documenting every little detail.
I also have a YouTube channel where you can find reviews, analysis, and other topics which strike my interest. Check that out on the Media page.