allen.tools

About Me

I am a data scientist :bar_chart: and engineer :computer::wrench:.

My life began at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital :hospital::sagittarius:; I was in Tallahassee until I was two or three years old when my family decided to move to Miami. My mother says that her husband gave her an ultimatum about leaving to go to Miami. After moving in with my grandfather, into a two-story on a quarter-acre of land in coral gables, and getting into trouble, they eventually divorced. My grandfather was a chemical engineer, and my father earned his bachelor’s degree in history while my mother worked in a grocery, and I grew up in apartments that my mother could afford. I didn’t have a close relationship with my father, and over time, most of my family became distant with a problematic contact. So before my thirties, I felt that there wasn’t much more I could do and decided to move on with my life.

Growing up, I spent time with my best friend, or cousins, playing with toys and getting into trouble. Before I became a teenager I learned to be technically inclined, I used hardware to edit memory address values of on video game consoles and took them apart. My first computer was a Macintosh LC in 1990, a Mac Classic, then a Powerbook 5300, an iMac in 1998, a Power Mac G3, whereas a hobby I taught myself about operating systems, network engineering, programming, and databases. During high school, I worked in grocery and was able to work in consumer goods hardware repair, and network operation centers doing engineering and taking on hardware and software engineering projects from clients. After about fifteen years, I found that I wanted to make something about me in my profession; I felt that I wanted to focus more on software programming than on engineering systems. In 2000 I switched to using Unix based operating systems starting with BSD and then Redhat and Debian and as such became with C and shell scripting. During the 1990s to the present, I regularly used HTML, (and related languages), and had familiarity with JavaScript, so I started teaching myself to program using JavaScript and then began my bachelor’s degree which then led to C++, Java, R, and Python.

I started taking courses in computer science and took calculus, linear algebra, engineering, and physics courses, and found that my school offered a data science program. Since I felt confident in my knowledge of computer science and engineering, I decided to do a degree in Information Studies which had a concentration in data science and then to minor in psychology for experimental design and research coursework. My Information Studies degree had a basic framework that centered around databases, programming, and research, and the concentration taught data science topics like descriptive statistics, analysis, data mining, and textual processing, finally my minor explained more research methodology. While working on my degree I contributed to a few organizations like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the IEEE, and the Interdisciplinary Data Science Colloquium, the IDSC, taught myself machine learning and worked with some clients discussing how to implement technology strategies. Professionally I started a business in July 2015, and when I finished college in late 2018 I decided to interview for a full-time position and transition into being a data scientist and engineer full time, and that’s what I do now.

I’m an American :it::es::fr:, always up for card playing :diamonds::hearts::spades::clubs:

In my personal life, I am a Knight with the Catholic :church: organization the Knights of Columbus, where I feel they are a family of sisters and brothers who I can volunteer and spend time. I also took coursework for an associates degree in health sciences, including weight lifting and nutrition, so I enjoy physical training and conditioning myself daily for good health. I also regularly enjoy martial arts, science fiction, and supernatural movies and entertainment; otherwise, I’m reading or doing research :notebook::memo: thank’s to my college degree being a great influence on me in structured intellectual curiosities. So that’s mostly everything there is to know about me.