About me

In 2012, I enrolled in the University of California, Irvine’s Biological Sciences program. Biology had always come easy to me, which made UCI, one of the top schools in the US for biology and medicine, a good fit. I excelled in my biology courses for the first year and a half. By then, I got restless. I knew the material but I dreaded the career propositions waiting at the end. I transferred to the School of Engineering to get my chemical engineering degree. I graduated in 2017 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering, a minor in biological sciences, and a specialization in energy and environment engineering.

I took a short break after I graduated. I wanted to think about what I could do with my degree besides chemical engineering. I worked for a couple of years as a lab service technician for JLL. There, I started learning VBA. Along with my real responsibilities, I used VBA macros and functions to build an Excel dashboard. It showed how our new point-of-use service increased the researchers’ time in the lab. My manager promoted me to Reagent Manager, and then to Maintenance Planner/Scheduler. My career path aimed towards reliability engineering. During this time, I taught myself more and more software, including Python and other languages.

After JLL, I became Computer Maintenance/Management Service (CMMS) administrator for Honeywell-Intelligrated. When I wasn’t working tickets, I created Tableau dashboards. We built these dashboards on data from our CMMS’s online SQL warehouses. Each customer had their own warehouse with work order and part replacement data. We manually ran reports against a specific warehouse for data sources to create or update our dashboards. This was a lot of manual work. We had to remember to refresh the data before customer meetings. Because each report was custom built for each customer, our reports had inconsistent names and calculations. To fix this, I created automated data pipelines that gathered data from each warehouse into one Azure SQL database. This let us automate and standardize our existing reports in new ways. After that, my focus shifted from building dashboards to maintaining and improving this pipeline. I was working as a data engineer, even if my title didn’t reflect it.

I later earned my data engineer title by joining an online education company called Age of Learning. We worked in PHP and Snowflake. This was my first experience with a mature CI/CD pipeline and proper software development practices, like code reviews. The position was a great learning experience, but the pace was too slow for me. I needed something where I could experiment, learn, and innovate, like I did in my previous roles.

Milliman had opened a data engineer position for their new Cloud Platform team, and I took it. My manager and I worked together to define this new role. Part of that role, we decided, had me writing user guides for other Milliman employees using our cloud environment. This meant I had to dive into brand new technologies, like Databricks, cloud computing, and cloud architecture. This was just the kind of work I was looking for when I left Age of Learning.

Over time, I found that I enjoyed writing more than anything else I had done before. I worked with the Knowledge Management group to move my user guides to the company’s intranet. Then I wrote more guides for brand new technologies and tools. Eventually, I started writing my team’s internal and client-facing technical design papers. While data engineering offers its own satisfactions, writing has let me use my technical expertise to stretch my creative muscles in new ways. Finding the right words to explain an idea to the right audience has been the most rewarding experience of my career.

Hobbies and interests

I like to read BFF (Big Fat Fantasy) novels, books about attention in the digital age, and books about books and reading. Big fantasy novels have an incredible depth and range. It’s one of the few genres where the author has a blank slate to create their world. That freedom highlights the differences between fantasy authors and their work. Joe Abercrombie is dark, grimy, and full of machiavellian politics. Brandon Sanderson is light, breezy, and paints an optimistic portrait of humanity. Patrick Rothfuss is lyrical, poetic, and full of portents. The genre’s breadth keeps it fresh and entertaining.

As a technology worker, I’m fascinated by how our modern tools effect us. It’s good to step back and think about how we interact with our devices. Books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Adam Alter’s Irresistible, and Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience have helped me do that. Although, I must admit, their impact is short lived.

My favorite genre is books about books. The book, as an object, is fascinating and is saturated in history and meaning. Every component of a book has a story. I’ve read the history of the footnote, of alphabetical order, and of the index. And I’m always looking for the next topic. Some of my favorites are: Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, Andrew Pettegree’s and Arthur der Weduwen’s The Library, and Christopher de Hamel’s The Manuscripts Club.

I also like to cook. My favorite is Mexican-style food, like enchiladas or tacos. I love salsas and sauces; I’m always hunting for the best mole in town. I even make my own tortillas. This passion for Mexican food probably stems from my Mexican heritage. I remember my grandmother making tacos, menudo, tamales, and other delicious meals.