Being a generalist in 2026 is brutal. The highest-paid doctors, engineers, and lawyers are all unbelievably specific. Employers want to see 5-7 years of experience with a particular tool. Almost by definition, if you want to accumulate that level of experience in early career, there isn't much room for anything else. That's my problem, and I suspect I'm not the only one.
But being a generalist has its perks too. The process of starting from scratch so many times leaves you well practiced in the undernourished skill of learning to learn. You develop an innate sense of where the Venn diagram of multiple, seemingly unrelated competencies overlaps. In my experience, that is usually grit, adaptability, critical thinking, immaculate note-taking, and rote memorization.
This website is my attempt to cash in on those intangibles. If you are reading this, you might be a prospective employer or business partner. I'd like to show you all of the things I can't convey in a resume, a cover letter, or even a GitHub page.
First, some background. I graduated high school in 2013. Not really knowing what I wanted to do in life, I chose computers. I was decent at math, it seemed well-paid/trendy, and I was curious about how they worked. I settled on a Computer Engineering Technology degree at Wentworth Institute of Technology. I was working the whole time, of course, and I had a surprisingly broad array of entry-level experience by then already. I had been a dishwasher, a server, a bartender, a delivery driver, a construction hand, a demolition hand, an HVAC helper, and an intern at a defense contractor. One year before I was set to graduate, I dropped out to enlist in the Army. The reason why is the topic of another article, but my career took a turn.
In the Army, I started off as infantry, indirect-fire infantry, to be exact. I quickly tried out for Special Forces and made it past selection. In the course, I wanted to do the hardest thing, so I chose medic. This was my first foray into the medical field — technically difficult, like engineering, with the physical rigor of the military attached and heavy on the psychomotor (not purely intellectual) skills. This time in my life had me studying everything from the Ranger Handbook to the DSM. I worked in hospitals, on ambulances, and stuck my friends with IVs over, and over, and over.
There was a time when I thought I would take this all the way. I might leave the military to become a Physician Assistant, or even a surgeon. I got my NREMT-P (paramedic) certification by proxy, which I could use in the civilian world should I ever leave the military — and that's exactly what happened.
This isn't the whole reason, but I was itching to go back to college. The military was never meant to be a career for me — just a way to force myself to work out (I was getting a little chubby) — and while I was staring down the barrel of a promising career as a Green Beret, I was always going to finish Plan A before I got stuck. So in 2020, right before Covid, I let my enlistment expire and went back to Boston.
By this time, I was obsessed with cybersecurity. Wentworth had, fortuitously, just begun to offer it as a major, and there was a decent amount of overlap between that and Computer Engineering. It cost me a year to switch, so I bit the bullet and set out to finally graduate undergrad by 2022 with a major in cybersecurity and a minor in computer science. In parallel (haha), I also took a job as a paramedic, making use of that certification I earned while enlisted. At the same time, I started learning Chinese, and transitioned from active duty to the National Guard, where I went back to being infantry for a unit in Massachusetts part-time.
This is already getting lengthy, so I'll speed it up. I had just enough GI Bill to finish undergrad and get a master's, so that's what I did. I applied to an international affairs (M.A.) program in D.C. and had to take economics & language courses out of pocket to knock out the prereqs. Adapting from a technical program to a more humanities-oriented one was a process. I had come from a world where the answer was right or it was wrong. I had to relax my mental framework in order to change the deliverable to a 50-page essay. In grad school, I continued to study Chinese on my own, won a scholarship to live in Taiwan to study language full-time, helped out as a research assistant, and had another internship with another defense prime. This brings us to 2026, where I have done, to recap: two years of full-time, intensive Chinese language study in Taiwan, two years of grad school, five years of undergrad across three domains, two internships, some research, four years active and three years guard, thought I might want to be a doctor, worked on an ambulance, and held a smorgasbord of entry-level gigs. This is also approximately the time I discovered the wonders of Claude Code.
All of this is not to mention the personal projects I've dabbled in along the way. I am deeply into finance, both personal and the underlying mechanics of public markets. I've explored graphic design, web development, and other interesting disciplines through online courses like Udemy. I've built Python programs to model investment strategies and celestial bodies. When I started using Claude, this went into overdrive. All of a sudden, it was live trading bots, news aggregators, video games, websites, encrypted messaging apps, chess engines, crypto validators, and building servers & PCs. This is all to say that while I have dabbled in a wide expanse of unrelated disciplines (and had a blast doing it), I have neglected to simply pick one and become the best at it. This does not bode well for a 31-year-old who is over-credentialed and under-specialized.
Which brings us to today. I watch the AI+robotics revolution shift the economy into high gear and desperately want to be a part of it. The same force that enabled me to be so productive in the last six months is making others fabulously wealthy. It is my belief that the efficiency gains from automation will eventually permeate throughout the entire economy, but I am not content to sit back and wait. Besides, it's less so the money that interests me and more the opportunity to help guide and advance this future with my own two hands. So, after a chat with Claude, we surveyed the field and discovered that, while my undergraduate degree doesn't say "engineering" on it, I did possess the technical backbone to shoot for another master's — of science, this time — that would say engineering. That's the foot in the door.
These days, though, a degree isn't enough — even an engineering one, arguably one of the most resistant to credential inflation left on the market. It gets me past the automated resume scanners, but it's not enough on its own to stand out. My goal with these articles is partly to address that, but also to extract more training value from my projects and to keep myself accountable. As a byproduct, I hope it provides more insight into how I work than a degree, or even a GitHub, could offer.
So that's the why. Next time, the what: a recap of week one back in the deep end, building hardware after a decade away.