This blog has been a long time coming, and to be perfectly honest, LONG overdue. At the time of writing, it is February 6th, 2026. This puts me in my fifth year as an LSU Computer Engineering student and about three months away from graduation (I am very, very scared).
And like a lot of engineering students approaching graduation, I started asking myself a simple question: What have I actually built?
LSU gave me a strong technical foundation in some ways. There have been a few classes, such as Computer Organization, Operating Systems, and ARM Assembly, that really challenged me and forced me to learn.
But what I’ve learned over the last few years is that engineering isn’t about getting a good grade and completing coursework — it’s about building real products and real systems, breaking them, debugging them at 2 AM, and figuring out how to make them reliable when real users and real money are involved.
And when I look back at the work I’m most proud of, almost all of it came from projects I started on my own, work I did at my job, or things I pursued through extracurricular activities early on.
To be honest, most of the technical depth I have today didn’t come from the classroom.
A lot of it started in high school through FIRST Robotics, where I got my first exposure to real engineering constraints: hardware that fails, deadlines that don’t move, and systems that have to work outside of a controlled lab environment. More posts are to come on each of these aspects whenever I get a shower-thought to post about them.
That accelerated during my internship and through personal projects, where I had to design, build, and maintain systems that people actually depended on.
College gave me exposure to a wide range of topics, but the moments where I grew the fastest were always when I was forced to build something real — something that had to work outside of a textbook or a grading rubric.
That’s when the idea of engineering really clicked for me.
At the end of the day, it’s not about getting the diploma and walking the stage. I know plenty of fellow engineering graduates who will get the diploma but have no real interest in pursuing their careers, and who will fall behind in this ever-changing world (with AI being a major driver of that change).
In reality, it’s about the brass tacks — getting real things done and gaining lessons and skills that make the next engineering challenge easier to tackle.
That is what this dev blog is about: showing the real, actionable work that I’ve put on the table.