About
Hi, I'm David. I got into this to find out how the magic worked.
It turned out there wasn't any. Starting my career writing kernels and schedulers in C and Ada meant meeting the computer with nothing between us — no runtime, no framework, no safety net, nobody to page at 3am. Every abstraction I'd been quietly grateful for turned out to be somebody's careful engineering, made of the same parts I was now writing by hand.
That has shaped how I work more than any language or framework has. I'm suspicious of things I can't explain to the bottom. I'd rather ship something smaller that I understand completely than something impressive that I'm holding by the handle.
These days that plays out in two directions. During the day it's real-time embedded software at Boeing — portability, low-level kernel work, anti-tamper security, and the DevSecOps tooling that keeps my team from losing hours to the same friction twice. On evenings and weekends it's machine learning, a document platform I built because my wife had a bad one at work, and a master's in computer science at Illinois to make the ML half rigorous rather than intuitive.
I like problems where the consequences are real. That's true of the software, and apparently it's true of me generally — the hobbies that stuck are the ones where you check your gear before you go.
Experience
Where I've worked
Software Engineer
Boeing
June 2021 — Present
Real-time embedded software for weapon systems, plus the DevSecOps tooling my team lives in every day. Starting my career at the bottom of the stack taught me that most of the "magic" in software is just somebody else's careful engineering.
- Engineered a processor from the ground up — kernel, task scheduler, comms protocol — in C and Ada. In production and shipping globally.
- Built a portable system library for any RTOS or bare-metal target using C++, Docker, Bazel and GitLab, cutting integration engineering hours by 4×.
- Wrote a Go HTTPS server that streamlined integration testing and made the test cycle 10× faster.
- Led reverse engineering of a cross-program missile interfacing application, improving real-time telemetry decoding and control (C#, WPF, XAML).
- Ran integration tests and data analysis for computer vision work in a simulator and on an experimental aircraft — I got to fly on it.
- Supported autonomous vehicle functions by processing GPS and sensor data in Ada and C++.
- Hardened an in-house Ada static analysis tool with new security warnings, in C++.
- Contributed to proposals that secured multi-million dollar contracts for Boeing weapon product lines.
Web Developer
Computational Learning Systems Lab
August 2020 — May 2021
Kept the lab's public face accurate: research pages, paper links, and a consistent format through every semester turnover.
- Maintained and updated the lab website and its research listings.
- Validated links to papers and project artifacts so citations actually resolved.
Quality Assurance Analyst
O'Reilly Auto Parts
June 2020 — August 2020
Tested production software and rewrote the SQL underneath the test workflow so results came back fast and correct.
- Optimized SQL queries inherited from a legacy database.
- Reviewed, tested and approved test cases against production software.
- Documented bugs in detail in Jira and Confluence.
Computer Lab Assistant
Missouri State University
September 2019 — May 2021
The person students found when something broke. Two years of translating computer problems into plain English.
- Resolved network, software and hardware issues for students, faculty and lab equipment.
- Wrote documentation so the same problem did not need solving twice.
Research Assistant
Computational Learning Systems Lab
July 2020
Data pipelines for algorithm research — preprocessing, running, and reporting results to the professor and grad students.
- Assisted published work on the effects of t-SNE on traumatic brain injury data.
- Built Python preprocessing pipelines with pandas, scikit-learn and matplotlib.
Background
Education
M.S. Computer Science — Data Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2025 — 2027 · In progress
B.S. Computer Science
Missouri State University
2017 — 2021 · GPA 3.52 · Dean's List 2019, 2020, 2021
Tools I reach for
Systems
AI / ML
Product
Practice
Let's connect
That's the short version
The longer one involves an experimental aircraft, a mushroom classifier, and a word game. Ask me about any of it.
Usually replies within 24 hours · St. Louis, Missouri