★ DEAN'S WORKSHOP ★

Physical systems don't lie. Structural load paths, electrical circuit behavior, hydraulic pressure drops — they all follow rules, and once you understand the rules you can read a system just by looking at it. That's what I'm always chasing.

Vehicles are one of my favorite domains because they're among the most complex engineered systems an everyday person owns and operates. Every subsystem — powertrain, suspension, electrical, thermal — talks to every other one. Understanding the whole picture is the goal.

PC hardware scratches the same itch. Trace routing, power delivery, memory timing — there's a physical reality underneath every benchmark number, and I want to understand it.

[ ACTIVE HOBBY ]

3D printing is where the digital and physical worlds collide. Design a part in CAD, slice it, send it to the machine — and a few hours later you're holding something real in your hand that didn't exist before. That loop never gets old.

I use it for functional parts, prototypes, repair brackets, and the occasional project that exists purely because I wanted to see if I could make it. FDM is my go-to — it forces you to think about layer orientation, infill, and material properties before you ever hit print. Good constraints make you a better designer.

When I started my data analytics program I expected to learn SQL and spreadsheets. Then I started building things in Python with AI collaboration — and the ceiling disappeared.

Coding with AI isn't about shortcuts. It's about what a single person can build when the gap between idea and implementation shrinks. I've built job search automation pipelines, a full portfolio site, and a dungeon crawler game from scratch. None of those projects would have happened at this pace — or maybe at all — without AI as a collaborator.

The possibilities feel genuinely endless, and I've only scratched the surface.

Before data pipelines and 3D printers, there was a grey console, a CRT television, and a kid who couldn't stop asking how things worked.

The PlayStation 1 was my first real window into engineered worlds. Not just games — systems. Hot Wheels: Turbo Racing made cars feel alive. Tyco RC and RC Revenge put you in control of something mechanical, something with physics and weight. Those games didn't just entertain — they made me want to understand what I was controlling. What made the cars handle the way they did? Why did one vehicle feel different from another?

Then there were the worlds. Spyro the Dragon built entire civilizations across dragon homeworlds and frozen tundras and sun-baked coliseums — each one with its own logic, its own feel, its own architecture. I didn't just want to play in those worlds. I wanted to understand how someone built them.

And then there was Einhander. A lone fighter jet threading through an ultra-futuristic cityscape, weapon systems that could be scavenged mid-battle, environments that felt like they belonged to a civilization centuries beyond our own. That game planted something in me — a fascination with hyper-advanced machinery, with the idea that technology taken far enough looks indistinguishable from a world someone imagined.

Those games are the root of everything on this page. The curiosity about vehicles, the interest in how mechanical systems work, the drive to build things — it traces back to a controller in my hands and a screen full of worlds I didn't fully understand yet but desperately wanted to.