About Me

Originally from Cary, NC, I went to Cary High School and graduated in 2012. I was in drum line in school and played in a band called Coastal Vision throughout most of high school.

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Coastal Vision was made up of Marc Kuzio (singer, guitar), Dale Yarborough (drums), and Kevin Lawless (bass). We were best friends and hung out almost every day. We all went to different schools so meeting up was sometimes difficult to coordinate, but when we got together magic always happened when they would strum and thump their guitars and I would beat my drum set.

Check out a clip of us playing a gig in downtown Raleigh, NC at the King’s Barcade –

Oh and here’s a screenshot of our blurb on MTV’s site –

We would often busk and dance in the streets of downtown Raleigh or Chapel Hill for people that would walk by or college students walking the streets at night. Those late nights were some of the best of my life. We would maybe make $50-$100 for a couple hours of flailing around with our instruments with these strangers, but the bond you share with your band mates during those times makes you feel like blood relatives. Fun fact: while at Cary High I sang in chorus, an a-capella group called ‘Green Eggs and Jam’, and was voted ‘Most likely to make you smile’ – that was my yearbook superlative.

Throughout my time at University, I covered collegiate basketball, baseball, football and some professional football games as a Beat Reported for ncaahoopsdigest.com and stadiumjourney.com. It was a lot to keep up with school work and drive back and forth from the triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) to cover these games for two years. I really enjoyed writing as well as my English classes in high school, so there was certainly a desire to find an outlet for putting my thoughts on paper (or in this case, the internet). I had reached out to a Craigslist ad around late 2012 to a guy named Josh that was looking for writers to cover sports games and write about them on his website ncaahoopsdigest.com. I was really interested to combine my interest for basketball and writing, so I sent off a few samples of my high school AP English essays.

He gave me the nod and I was set for the next year to cover mainly NC State Wolf Pack basketball games. Initially I was given an opportunity to write about the games I was watching on tv or keeping up with online (and constantly refreshing basketball scores on the ESPN app), and after the game was over I would compile notes, write a blurb, then send it off to Josh. Not long afterward I could see my published work online and share it with friends and family.

It got even cooler when Josh called me one day and let me know he had gotten me tickets, Floor Tickets! to almost every NC State Wolf Pack game the next season. I was in! I just had to pick up the tickets at the role call window along with a specific media parking pass. It felt unreal pulling up in my dad’s 2004 pine-green colored, convertible Mazda Miata. I went on to write for ncaahoopsdigest.com long enough to get an opportunity to cover Duke Blue Devil’s basketball games at Cameron Indoor Stadium and North Carolina Tar Heels at the Dean Smith Center. Being in the same room with Coach K and Roy Williams feels like being in the same room as royalty. All of the media were instructed to put there cameras away and phones on the table in front in order to be present with the coaches for interviewing after the games. This was all in addition to them being surrounded by what looked like secret service.

Some of my favorite interviews included Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, Tyus Jones, Grayson Allen, and Jahlil Okafor of the Duke Blue Devils, and T.J. Warren of the NC State Wolf Pack.

Here is the only article I can still find now from either site:

Wake Forest University, David F. Couch Ballpark

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After a two year stint writing about sports games and venues I decided to focus on my core coursework at school and left my gig at both websites.

When I transferred to Appalachian State University in January of 2015, I joined AIESEC, the American Marketing Association, I joined an a-capella group called Higher Ground, joined the Linux user group as the secretary for a semester, and contributed as a developer on the University’s solar car business team. I worked on the Squarespace site at the time and built an Alexa Skill to quiz new members’ knowledge of the Formula Sun Grand Prix rules and regulations. You can still ask Alexa today to quiz you with the skill I built with the invocation name ‘solar car quiz’.

Here are a few pictures from my time with the team –

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I began looking to get better at writing code and warmed up to the idea of actually being a good developer. At the end of May in 2015, I moved in with my now best friend, a few minutes away from downtown Atlanta. He encouraged me to take a beginner in-person class on HTML and CSS at this place called General Assembly not far from where we were living. We learned how to build a very simple biography page/ SPA (single page application) website. I enjoyed the class and tried to consume and retain as much as I could from the hour long class and asked the instructor after she finished teaching, if I could buy her a meal somewhere and pick her brain more in depth on web development. Unbelievably she said yes. We got a bite to eat a few days later. And I did this thing I now am very embarrassed about. I would sit down with someone who I wanted to learn from or gain a better understanding of a subject, and I would get my phone out, press record and sit it out in the middle of the table. Not even slightly subtlety. But I would go home and play the recording over and over. I did this with a lot of people, and again I am embarrassed to admit it, but I didn’t even think twice to simply ask permission. We finished our meal and I had learned to ask two questions (I’m not even sure where I learned this from): ‘Who do you know that I should know?’ And secondly, ‘Are you willing to introduce me?’

Here are a couple pictures I dug up from that class and a biography page I began working on putting together with the new skills I learned from the one-hour introductory course –

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I was amazed that time and time again, there was always someone that came to mind, and many many times people were generous enough to introduce me to the individual that came to mind. The instructor for the HTML and CSS course was a front-end engineer at Coca Cola in Atlanta, and she introduced me to a coworker (development team manager) that I shared a meal with, and that individual introduced me to yet another individual (developer). I eventually started sending out my resume to web application development opportunities in Atlanta, and thankfully (and undeservedly) I landed a gig for a company called Super Green Solutions in Roswell, Georgia. My grandmother had passed away that summer weeks before I was able to deploy my first website ever. She was my biggest fan, and I broke down at the thought that I could really do this line of work and that one day I would really be good enough. That was a huge day for me. I felt like I was really making her proud by trying to make something of myself.

I found my favorite picture of us together and figured I had to throw that in here –

Here is a picture of the building the day I finished my internship in 2015.

September of that same year I found a site called Udemy.com that was not very popular among people that I was around at the time, but today is one of the most widely used online learning platforms. And at the time the most popular course covered material on the Amazon Web Services Cloud Solutions Architect certification.

I bought the course and began to read whitepapers, faqs, and took countless labs on qwiklabs.com. I really wanted to learn cloud services and thought that would be my opportunity to get ahead of my peers that had a more specific focus on a particular programming language. Nonetheless I studied, I read, I practiced, and I signed up for my first Amazon Web Services certification exam. August 17, 2016 I got to the testing center and felt like I had what it takes to pass the exam, no doubt about it. I walked in, I put my things in a locker and waited for my name to be called before being seated in front of a computer with two pencils, some paper to write notes, and some ear plugs. I got a grade of 40/100 on that attempt. I was really embarrassed and didn’t know if I wanted to continue trying to learn this technology. I put the exam score behind me, and got back to studying. Mind you, I really had very little knowledge of what I was reading and trying to practice. The material was very foreign. It wasn’t something anyone around me believed I could even do.

I also didn’t have much money at this point in my life. I spent the next summer living out of a convertible Mazda Miata, sleeping in the very back of the parking lot behind a dorm called Mountaineer Hall, or in the Walmart parking lot not far from campus, or on the side of the highway near my University, or occasionally along the Blue Ridge Parkway. I stopped doing that after spending one night in one of the early stops on the parkway by a body of water. It was a pretty area, but I woke up to a family staring at me outside of my car window. It was an embarrassing experience and I wanted so badly not to be seen struggling financially and not having a place to sleep each night. I am grateful a friend from school let me crash a few times on a couch at her place with her and her cat. Unfortunately I am allergic to cats, so that didn’t work out great for long. It was also difficult constantly asking friends for shelter time and time again. I felt like a really big inconvenience to the people around me and I felt like it was my problem to deal with, so I would find a way out of this situation and work hard to never be in situations like it again. I also used the dating app, Tinder, quite a bit to find places to sleep. It was less of a dating app in a lot of ways and became more of a tool for asking strangers if I could crash at their place. And for the record I’d be disingenuous if I wasn’t honest about using the app for other purposes too. Sometimes everything worked out, and other times there were some wild experiences that I will never forget. One time out in the middle of nowhere North Carolina about an hour northeast of Boone, I had a girl’s dad pull a shotgun on me late at night and tell me to get lost (which happens I guess), and then the next day drove to Maryland to see another girl that I had matched with on Tinder months before while on a trip with my best friend (who was born and raised in Maryland) and I had been on a road trip to see his dad. There were some wild wild times and I’m thankful that that stage of my life is very far from me now.

I spent a lot of my nights talking to my two best friends that at the time who were both traveling internationally. They were both about a 13-hour time zone difference from me. I would sit in the car night after night reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ and studying Amazon Web Services notes or watch lectures on services and tools on the platform. I had an egg crate (that I had used as an extra layer on top of my college dorm bed at Summit Hall the semester before, to sleep on the ground with some really comfy sheet that someone had purchased for me at some point. I really didn’t mind the whole situation so bad. I figured I got myself into the position I was in since I made the decision to transferred schools and change my major the first semester I had moved up to Boone, NC in 2015.

I had also been passionate about virtual reality (VR) since 2014, when a great family friend of mine showed me the Surge VR music video. At that moment, I knew VR was going to take over and I wasn’t sure I would ever see something so incredible again. I was mesmerized. I had never heard of the technology and I don’t know how the conversation came up to point me in the direction of meeting up with my friend, Barrett, to take a look at his Oculus DK1 (dev kit). I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that same humbling, overwhelming sense of amazement as I did in that very moment. I began messing around with VR and bought a ticket to Unite Boston, 2015. I wasn’t able to make it after all, so I reached out to the Unity team to see if they could help me figure out how I could make another conference. They gave me a pass to Vision Summit in February of 2016. I flew out to LA for the first time. I had the star struck moment landing at LAX and feeling like I was ready to take over the planet. Passionate, determined, young and dumb. I was wearing a HackDuke (I’ll talk more about that below) at the time I had landed and some guy walked over to me while I was at baggage claim. He asked me about my shirt. Asked if I was a developer. I told him yes (and by yes, I meant I could copy and paste with the best of em). He, for some reason, asked if I was interested in sharing a cab to his favorite taco place by the Santa Monica beach. I couldn’t say no to that. I didn’t have to pay for the Uber there, I ended up getting a free meal out of it, we walked around the pier on the beach, and we shared an Uber that took me to my place and then he went off to his place. I didn’t pay for a damn thing. I thought this was by design, just the life of every developer. So I ran with that idea. I really ran with it.

Here’s a glimpse of that trip to Los Angeles, CA –

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Because I was an attendee for this Unity3D event, I was eligible for a free Vive-pre headset that the CEO of Valve had offered to a limit number of developers. Check it out along with a few other VR and AR headsets I would go on create with and get my friends to try out –

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I had also been traveling across the country trying to make as many hackathons as possible. My best friend from Atlanta told me about a hackathon at Emory University. That was my first taste. Actually, HackDuke may have come just before I attented HackATL, I don’t know for certain.

Here’s a picture while at HackDuke (and if interested, the git repository here) –

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Here’s a few pictures from HackATL –

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I traveled to a few more hackathons, like..

HackPrinceton, Novemeber 2016 (the Devpost submission and git repository) –

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Reality, Virtually, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017 –

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This was one of my top two favorite hackathons ever. The people were some of the most brilliant minds I’d ever been around. I saw technology I could hardly fathom. I ate SO much food. And I made some fantastic friendships.

My team and I worked to build a haptic sensor feedback tablet that you could use to locate augmented reality crystals spaced out among the room that you would only be able to see while wearing a Microsoft Hololense. It was the first time I really got to use Unity3D to build anything remotely cool like that and trust me, I did not do the heavy lifting. But it gave me an opportunity to even see what that looked like, talk to the people that understood hardware and software much better than I did. I got to ask questions and be part of conversations that helped us all come to conclusions that brought us closer to having an MVP (minimum viable product). Those are things I had never experience before at that level, and I really am so thankful that I even got accepted.

I also got to try out the PS4 VR headset here before it was officially announced. And the graphics and lack of motion sickness (comparatively speaking at the time) was mind blowing. I really got a glimpse of where the future of tech was headed.

In between failing my first attempt at the Amazon Web Services Cloud Solutions Architect certification and the second failed attempt at the same certification, I obtained my first professional certification. My Unity3D developer certification.

After attending Vision Summit LA in November of 2016, I knew I had to go back. A cousin of mine and I had tried our shot at creating a company that produced virtual reality content, but it didn’t really pan out. Neither one of us had the experience, and I was still just getting my bearings down as a developer. We ended up focusing on the idea of doing tours of cities and local buildings/ companies. We didn’t make a tremendous amount of progress and our focus wasn’t all there. But I was able to put something together to showcase what we were hoping to mold and craft, but ultimately we just didn’t have all the necessary pieces of the puzzle. Here’s an example – Realty In VR – Downtown Cary Tour.

Here’s a quick look at the second trip to Los Angeles where I passed the Unity3D certification –

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I also became an Appalachian State University Fast Track Member during the same time period. In September of 2016, my friend Spenser and I discussed the idea of applying to Appalachian State’s FastTrack program and working together on a project called ‘Rooibus’. We were both interested in virtual reality and both saw an opportunity to create web-browser based school education in virtual classrooms. We were offered free passes to discuss Rooibus at Collision Conference in 2018. Click here to read an an article written about the two of us and our project ‘Rooibus’ by a reporter from the Collision Conference in New Orleans, LA. And a few more pictures below –

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Again, this didn’t pan out all the way, but like the last project I had worked with my cousin on, I learned a lot and gained a much better perspective of what it took to make an idea get off the ground and how to sell that idea with the constraint of a very short consumer attention span. Fun fact: The conference ran the same week of finals week my final semester at Appalachian State. I finished a few of my classes early to attend the conference. But for one of my classes I was on a team of students working on a project collectively that was going to be presented that week. So I put together a Power Point presentation with a line-for-line written out speech that my team members could copy and paste into this text-to-speech serverless web app I built with AWS (S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda, and a few python scripts) before the presentation. I even wrote out when to turn the Power Point slides for the presentation. Check it out here if you’re interested.

The following year, I scheduled the same AWS certification exam the day before my birthday, July 17th, 2017. I was psyched. I really thought I could pass the exam after studying as long as I had. I had pages and pages of notes, I had completed more practice labs, I had created a few Alexa Skills, I had told my friend this was ‘my thing’. I was the ‘AWS guy’ in my group of peers. Not to mention, I had worked for a company called Vixster, a waste and recycling removal company, for about a few months prior to taking the exam (which is really successful in the mountains of North Carolina), but I had asked that for my services, for the owner, Zak, to pay for me to take an Amazon Web Services certification exam ($150 USD). That’s what I was working toward and I was really motivated.

I was confident walking in the door. When I was called up and walked into the room of testing computers, I made sure I had my pencils, paper, and ear plugs all lined up in a coordinated fashion. I began my test. I finished the 55 (it is now 65) question exam early and double checked a few questions I had flagged. I submitted my test and was shown a screen with my pass/ fail result. I failed. I went home, waited a few days and got a result of 47/100. This was the most deflated I had felt in as long as I could remember. I had already planned how I was going to celebrate and the first 50 people I would call to tell them I passed.

That’s a big part of life. Failing.

Not long afterward, I had submitted a virtual reality idea for the University’s Pitch Your Idea Competition. The pitch won 3rd place out of the 37 other entries. Here’s a link and quick glimpse at the teams that placed –

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After that, I heard my school library was opening up a Maker Space on the bottom floor of the library. I put my resume together, I found the two people in charge of putting it together (who both later turned into my two bosses) and I was eager to be the first Maker Space student developer hired. I got the job and I worked as many hours I could. I was tasked with operating multiple 3D printers (printing off models/.stl files that students would submit for classes or personal use), operate vinyl cutters, sewing machines, a CNC router, a HoloLense, and HTC Vive, and Oculus DK1 and DK2’s. In addition to that I used Simplify3D, Cura, VCarve Pro Shopbot edition, programmed applications with Raspberry Pi’s and Arduino single board computers.

I spent another year studying before taking, not the Amazon Web Services Cloud Solutions Architect – Associate exam, but the Amazon Web Services Developer – Associate certification exam. I kept pushing back the exam date time and time again. But my friend Rachel pushed me to commit to a date and tackle it head on. I reflect often on how big of a turning point that was for me. I needed to hear that. And I needed to hear those words from her, and I’m grateful for you more than you will ever know, if you ever read this. I passed the exam March 2, 2018. I called my best friend, I called my dad, I called my mentor, I called my cousin, I called Rachel and I just cried. Just months before I graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in Computer Information Systems and already a Unity3D developer and Amazon Web Service Developer – Associate certifications.

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I wasn’t done attending conferences after I graduated though. A few weeks afterward, I attended the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in June of 2018 –

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It was so freaking cool. Getting to see how government contractors, government sectors, and others were utilizing AWS services within the AWS Gov Cloud! Again, great food, super nice people, and incredible companies working on ground-breaking projects with regulatory, private, sensitive data that needs an extra secure environment. A got to hear talks from gov entities like the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) on how they were migrating vast amounts of data from on-premises environments to the AWS Gov Cloud. It was really fascinating. Plus, at this conference, there was a VIP section for AWS certified members, and as I’m sure you know now, I had just passed my certification and was feeling on top of the universe. I got to network with other AWS certified members and extra-delicious foods only offered in this VIP section. It was really exciting, and I was honestly overwhelmed that there were some-odd 17,000 attendees at this conference. I was blown away. I networked, I looked for jobs and asked probably half of those 17,000 attendees what they did, who they worked for, and who was willing to give me a job on the spot. I got business cards, but sealed zero deals. And that was okay, I technically at the time already had a job offer, and an offer from one of the government contractor companies that had a booth at this event, talking to people about their company and how they served the public. And that job offer ultimately didn’t pan out as I expected. Things took a turn and eventually I was waiting on the company to be cleared to bring me in, but I needed a job ASAP, so I went back on the hunt.