Taking a Tour of my Dad's Work

One ordinary day, my dad's work hosted a party. At some point during the party, he took me and my mom on a tour of his work. He was an electrical engineer who worked on sensors for oil rigs at the time. We ended up at his desk, which was made out of metal with an industrial oven right beside it. The room had boring white walls where he was working on one of the sensors, and he had some scrap pieces of wire on it that he gave to me. The job didn’t exactly inspire me, but what did was to build robots. I lacked both the funds and the knowledge to start building robots. After that day, I found old tech in my house like a floppy disk, and I was hooked on computer science and engineering.

I was in 4th or 5th grade when I got into Morse code. My dad helped me build a Morse code box. We built it in an Altoids tin with an LED and a buzzer that can be toggled on and off so it did not annoy people. He sat with me and helped me build it. That was my very first engineering project. I became the IT person at my school between that time. Some time later I built a macro pad. It was during the COVID pandemic. At that time I also got into live streaming and creating YouTube videos, so I needed a way when I was live streaming to move between my face and gameplay. After looking on YouTube, I decided to build a macro pad, so I bought the buttons and microcontroller. Over a few nights, I built it and programmed it where I found the code and modified it for the amount of buttons I used that I used for it. My dad brought me a Corbin fiber piece from his work, and I used it for the housing for it. Then some time later I built an audio mixer that was a MIDI controller, so I can mix the different audio sources like one from Chrome, Spotify, and the game sound. After doing my research on YouTube, I bought the parts and did the test build. Through these projects, I learned that building is cheaper than buying items like the macro pad and the mixer commercially.

Then I was in 12th grade and I decided to work on a more intense project. a media server on a small credit card size PC that did not have the computing power for what I did with it. I used an external hard drive for the media storage and had to add media to it over the network. I did a lot of research for it. I was excited when I got it to work, but sadly I lost my documentation. Since the pc didn’t have the computing power, I moved it to a different pc. My old gaming pc was the host of it, and served me for a year or so, then I migrated it to a mini pc. Which is more efficient than that old pc. And it is still in production as we speak.

My goal is to become a system administrator in a big tech company. That tour at my Dad’s work gave me a career path that I want to follow. To reach my goals, I am going to improve my craft by going to college and taking IT certification. I am working on the project as I speak, and learning IT skills. And last semester I had an internship at Fulcrumgroup, a MSP (Managed Service Provider), that taught me a lot. Also, it is partly the money that is important too, but that is not the be all and end all. I want to learn and keep on growing. I want to teach what I have learned to make someone as interested in IT as I was. And to give someone a path to go down like that tour did for me all those years ago. My journey is not over. There is always something new around the corner to be learned.