Nurse turned engineer. Building real infrastructure, writing production code, and documenting the entire journey from healthcare to tech.
I'm a nurse pursuing a Software Engineering degree at Western Governors University. But the degree is just one piece — I'm deliberately building projects across three disciplines to develop skills that make me more marketable once I graduate.
Software engineering gives me the foundation. Networking gives me the infrastructure knowledge that most developers never touch. Data engineering ties it all together — because every system produces data, and the people who can build the pipeline from sensor to dashboard are the ones who get hired.
I don't simulate labs. I build production systems on real hardware, break them, troubleshoot them, document what happened, and publish the results. Every project in this portfolio is running live — not in a sandbox, not in Packet Tracer, not in a tutorial.
The home lab isn't part of my degree plan. I'm building it because I figured out that the gap between "I studied networking" and "I built a network" is the gap that gets you hired.
A Cisco enterprise branch router acts as the sole router with a public IP from the ISP. ISP gateway in bridge mode. Every device in the house routes through infrastructure I configured from scratch.
Internet → ISP Modem (Bridge Mode) → Enterprise Router (Public IP) │ ├── Access → Home Server (SERVER VLAN) ├── Trunk → 8-Port PoE+ Switch │ ├── Pi-hole DNS + WLAN Controller (MGMT VLAN) │ └── Wireless APs (Multi-SSID, VLAN-tagged) ├── Trunk → 16-Port PoE+ Switch │ ├── Streaming devices (TRUSTED VLAN) │ └── Wall-drop distribution └── Reserved
Every lab is a real troubleshooting incident on my home lab network, broken down step-by-step and mapped to CCNA exam topics.
After flipping the ISP gateway to bridge mode, Apple TV streaming boxes lost app connectivity while phones and laptops on the same VLAN worked fine.
Installing Tailscale for remote management broke all TCP connectivity — SSH, HTTPS, and streaming failed while ping worked perfectly.
Each project targets a different skill set — all running on the same home lab infrastructure.
Enterprise home network on a Cisco branch router. 7 VLANs, 4 ACLs, dual managed switch trunks, Pi-hole DNS, multi-SSID WiFi with 5 VLAN-tagged broadcasts. The Cisco is the sole router for the entire household.
ESP32 + BME280 → MQTT → Python → SQLite → Streamlit. Rate-of-change anomaly detection via rolling z-scores. 5,600+ readings, zero packet loss.
78K+ lines across 3 repos. 546+ posts/week to 3 Facebook pages. MCP server, Remotion rendering, multi-API orchestration, automated engagement on Railway.