About Me

I grew up on the California coast, about an hour south of San Luis. I've loved computers and electronics for as long as I can remember, with KTurtle and BOE-Bots being my first tastes of programming. By middle school, I was determined to become an engineer after attending Building an Engineer Day at Cal Poly, and by college, I was well on my way to a career in computer engineering. During that time, I had a fun sampling of internships, from underground directional drilling to biomedical manufacturing. I even watched a rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB while interning at The Aerospace Corp. All that to say, I have a diverse range of interests and experiences, and I'm always up for exploring and learning new things.

   My Work

I started my career interning with Workday in Pleasanton, CA building HR software for the education and govenment sector. I fell in love with Workday's culture, fast-paced environment, and commitment to putting their employees first. Surprisingly, I'd get to give my elevator pitch—in an actual elevator—to a founder of Workday's latest acquisition. From that, I landed a full-time offer in Boulder, CO helping integrate GridCraft's spreadsheet product into Workday's existing stack.

Since then, I've helped a dozen teams either onboard with Workday or start a new product from scratch. I've become an expert in designing and building APIs to interact with our power-of-one database, either with internal tooling, or Java-based Spring apps. I spent my longest stretch on our Drive product which serves as a home for the other applications in our GSuite-like offering with a proprietary twist. I specialized in a form of share-based access controls, which was new for Workday. That security mindset came in handy as I have since shifted to a new project around dynamic PDF generation. I help customers discover critical data with which to build document templates, as well as ensure the validity and security of the resulting PDF. And most importantly, I'm having a blast doing it!

   My Interests

I have more hobbies than I have time for, but that doesn't stop me from trying.
I love figuring out how stuff works, and I'm constantly building, bashing, and belaying.
Here are a few of my favorite projects, passtimes, and video games that made the cut.

sslees.com

I was determined to design a personal website that doesn't rely on WordPress or Squarespace, so I set out to build this one with Caddy, Hugo, and enough JS and SCSS knowledge to be dangerous.

Crafting Interpreters

I completed Bob Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters tutorial where I built a lexer, parser, compiler, and VM for a dynamically-typed language that includes inheritance, hash tables, and a garbage collector.

Advent of Code

I'm always looking forward to December when I get to join hundreds of thousands of developers in an annual 25-day coding competition filled with creative and entertaining programming problems that I solve in Python.

Eternity II

This deceptive edge-matching puzzle with its 256 cardboard tiles has been an arduous exercise in backtracking algorithms and C performance optimization, plus there's the allure that it's never been solved yet.

Ludum Dare

A few times a year, I build cheesy pixel-art games using Aseprite for the art and Godot for the game engine.

Rubik's Cubes

I have a sub-30-second best, but I often spend more time ranking algs in spreadsheets than practicing.

3D Printing

My Ender 3 S1 is constantly churning out things from Printables or that I've designed in Fusion 360.

Rock Climbing

After years of living in Colorado, I finally started top roping and bouldering, and I immediately fell in love.

Raspberry Pi

Recently I started work on a 5-Pi cluster or "bramble" that I plan on using to learn more about Kubernetes.

Picosystem

This little guy is great for retro games on the go, and I made myself a Tetris clone in MicroPython.

Pi Pico

With a tiny footprint and a WiFi antenna, I use one of these to monitor temps in my greenhouse.

3pi Robot

This bot's IR sensor array makes it great for high-speed maze solving and testing out PID algorithms.

FIRST Robotics

I owe a lot to my mentors and teammates on 3512.

Factorio

I have dreams about belts and inserters now.

Tetris

This is an all-time classic that I love/hate.

Crash Bandicoot

Getting 105% complete in the remake is brutal.