I got into this by being the person who said "there has to be a better way"

I am an undergrad at the University of Houston. During the week I work at a flatbed carrier, and the job I was hired for is not really the job I do now. What happened is what usually happens: I noticed a thing that was taking somebody an hour, said out loud that it did not have to, and then had to back that up.

The first one was paperwork. Drivers were texting photos of bills of lading to whoever was nearby, and those photos were getting dragged into a Drive folder by hand with names like IMG_4471.jpg. Nobody thought of it as a problem because it had always worked, right up until a broker called about a load from two months ago and the search was a person scrolling through a phone.

I have since built the company's website, moved everyone onto proper domain email, and written the pipeline that files the paperwork. I still run all of it. That last part matters more than it sounds: building something and then living with it for a year teaches you things that shipping and walking away never will. Every bad assumption I made comes back around eventually, usually on a Friday.

What I am actually good at

Figuring out what the real problem is. Most requests show up already dressed as a solution, and the useful work is underneath, in whatever specific moment is costing time or losing information. I like sitting with the person doing the task and just watching, because the workaround somebody invented three years ago is always the interesting part and it never makes it into the description.

After that it is mostly ordinary engineering. Static sites that load fast on a phone with two bars. Scripts that hand you the weird cases instead of guessing. DNS records that mean the email arrives. None of it is glamorous and all of it is the difference between a business that runs and a business that is constantly putting out small fires.

What I am still figuring out

Knowing when to stop. My instinct on the paperwork pipeline was to make it so good it would never need a human review folder, and that instinct cost me an afternoon of cleanup and a Drive full of folders that should not have existed. An automation that openly hands you the twenty percent it cannot handle is better than one that hides its mistakes in the five percent it got wrong. I know that now. I did not know it then.

I am also trying to write more of this down as I go. The case studies on this site started as notes to myself so I would stop relearning the same lessons, and it turns out that the write-up is a decent way to find out whether you actually understood what happened.

Where I am headed

Still in school, still shipping. I am open to freelance projects and to full time roles after graduation, and I am most useful somewhere the software touches something physical, where a bug means a truck sits or a document goes missing rather than a metric moves. That kind of work has consequences you can see, which I like.