Software engineer in Chicago.
Back when I was a kid, I remember staring at my dad's computer screen and seeing code and terminals for the first time. Later, when he told me more about what he did, I decided I wanted to do something similar in engineering. He started as an electrical engineer and later became a software engineer working in telecom networking. By high school, I was dabbling in engineering classes to see if I liked them. I took computer science classes too and realized that I really enjoyed the problem-solving they gave me.
Since graduating from UIUC in 2022, I've been at Epsilon building testing frameworks, automation, and the tooling around them. Much of my current work has focused on improving our overall systems, since many of them were pretty old and hadn't been maintained well. Most of the repos we maintain started as POCs and were never refactored into production-ready suites. Basically, there were a lot of Band-Aids. Over the past year, I've focused on improving our applications, whether that means changing the architecture or improving code quality throughout our repos.
I started playing violin when I was five. I spent years traveling and performing with my academy, took a break, and recently started playing again. Last year, that meant playing at a few farmers markets, which was low-stakes and a lot of fun.
I also climb a lot—stereotypical SWE, I know. It's the easiest way I've found to stop thinking about work for a while. If you climb too, I'm @klmrmt on Kaya.
The part I like most is finding whatever is slow, fragile, or confusing and making it simpler. Lately, I've been more interested in building products. I've been working on games and a few social platforms on the side. I've also been playing around with AI to see how prompting might change the way software engineers work.