Late last year after another successful FQT, my software lead announced that they would be retiring at the end of January 2023. Not too long afterward, my project managers called me into their office and offered me the position of SW team lead. Needless to say, I accepted the position, and immediately began preparing for the transition into the large shoes that would soon need filling.

Shortly before my two year anniversary, I was surprised to get called into my manager's office and told I had been promoted to Associate (equivalent to Senior Software Engineer) for working diligently on my assigned tasks and consistently seeking out ways to improve things above and beyond my regular duties. At this level, I continued to expand the scope of my responsibilities with the firm. When Booz Allen launched a pilot program designed to streamline the process for hiring software engineers and DevOps engineers, I volunteered to participate as one of the firm’s centralized hiring interviewers. Because of this new process, I’ve had the chance to assess the skills of well over 50 candidates of widely varying backgrounds and experience levels while maintaining fairness and standardization between candidates.During this time, I also became a career manager – which is a mentor of and an advocate for their assigned employees. Beyond just signing and approving timesheets, my role as a CM is to help guide newer employees through their journey with the firm.And on top of all of that, I became the deputy lead of my software team when the next project iteration began. On top of writing and debugging software, I had the responsibilities of ensuring the team was utilizing our work item tracking system so that accurate metrics could be reported to our stakeholders, participating in software reviews, facilitating and organizing meetings with our client, and filling in for the lead whenever they were not available.

Before coming to Booz Allen Hamilton, I've heard that when the government wants some very talented people with a wealth of experience on a project, they look to a good contractor. Having been here for a while now, I see firsthand why that is. I've also heard that if you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. When I first started, I was just positive that I was the LEAST smart person in the room, so I definitely needed to be there. And ever since then, I've been stretching myself and doing my best to continuously grow and add value to the team.I started with the firm as a Senior Consultant (analogous to Software Engineer Mid Level) at the beginning of the FQT portion of our development lifecycle. Upon arrival, I had to learn my way around a mission planning system that our client has been using for many years with many complex rules and components. I fixed a few simple bugs here and there and even found some time (once I knew a little bit of something) to create some documentation that would be tailored to and useful for a newcomer (such as myself). But right after the COVID pandemic started, we were starting development for the next version of our software to be fielded in the near future. The process of going through all of those sprints, implementing complex user stories, going through peer reviews, and getting ready for all those sprint reviews (all while masked up) was by far the biggest catalyst of growth for my software development capabilities.

This - the first job out of college - is what adulting feels like (well, at least adulting level 1 out of who knows how many). I started my federal service working on a team focused on tracking radars, telemetry, and TSPI (time space & position information) data. I was eager to sink my teeth into a meaty software development project and after coming up to speed with some background knowledge I got a great opportunity. One of my key tasks was to design binary data conversion software (using C++) for processing test data. It was a chance to develop and test something independently all in a hurry. Feeling energized by the challenge, there were days where I looked up from my computer screen and saw that the sun had went all the way down. Overall, I believe that development is best done in teams, but at some point in every software engineer's career, they should have to experience what it is like to be an individual contributor. If I could have done things differently, I would have taken the time to make my code easier to pass along to someone else (better comments, a more appropriate software architecture for the job, more thorough unit tests, etc..)The next group I got to work in dealt with Electronic Warfare. Here, I got to utilize my Java skillset extensively for the first time in a while (besides small things here and there in my personal time) - building GUIs and other code to parse and process messages. I even got thrown into the duty of being this team's scrum master (there were about 10 of us), and didn't realize how useful that experience would be later on.The most unique experience I had in the DoD was getting to work with Unity 3D and create Mixed Reality/Virtual Reality applications with a team of about 6 other engineers on a brief project. There's something pretty satisfying about making an F-18 fly towards the table in the middle of the room and launch a missile at a SAM site to blow it up, all while "Danger Zone" is playing in the background!

One of the many perks to attending the nations #1 Public HBCU and the top producer of Black STEM graduates was that firms from all over the country seeking talented young people to join their ranks flocked to our career fairs regularly. Marathon grabbed my attention with their rotational program where they would bring their strong performers back for multiple iterations across the firm. I was blessed to get an interview, and before I knew it, I was loading up my '96 Maxima on the way to Ohio.For my first of three rotations, I got to work at the HQ as an IT Marketing Applications Intern. The thing I liked best about this one was how many different things I got to touch. I learned SQL for the first time, dabbled in VB.NET, got familiar with Microsoft Project 2010, created an IT safety bulletin for company wide distro (it even wound up in the lobby on a screen!), and took a business analyst class that taught me valuable skills on how to identify opportunities for improvement in the all-too-often massive gap between IT resources and business needs.On my next visit, I landed in the Operations, Accounting, Governance & Tax arena. It was here - while working on an application written in VB6 - that I learned something as simple yet critical as how to use a debugger. You read that correctly: I made it up to this point in my career having never set a breakpoint to fix any of my code!Lastly, I got to experience being an IT Systems Integrator intern at one of their refineries in a small midwest town. Here, I helped develop a lightweight web application using Razor that replaced the client’s old system of using massive excel sheets.This was one of the richest learning experiences in my career. Not just because of the experience I gained, but also for the lack of maturity I had as a younger man and some bad habits that managed to poke holes in my professionalism. Learning things the hard way is NOT pleasant, but it can be good as long as you actually learn your lesson.

This was my first internship during college. I managed to get the position working through the T. Howard Foundation, who's mission is to promote diversity in media and entertainment by increasing the number of diverse and underrepresented groups and underserved communities within the industry. Through THF, I met some top notch people, learned powerful career tips that I applied to this day, and had a blast at the 3 day orientation in NYC! At Comcast, I was exposed to a lot of new things. I saw and handled more than my fair share of set-top boxes - spending a good amount of time ensuring that the hundreds of cables and connections were well organized and properly installed. While creating a documentation template for hardware testing, I learned how to do things with Excel that were more useful than I could have imagined at the time (it seems everywhere I have gone since, I've had to create a fancy spreadsheet with lots of formatting and wild formulas to do something). My main programming assignment was to translate the source code of a legacy app written in C to Java. Unbeknownst to me at the time, C code does not perfectly resemble C++ code (which I was more familiar with from my classwork) in terms of structure and syntax, so I had to spend a decent amount of time researching the differences between the two. My biggest two takeaways from that coding experience was that (1) there is almost always more than one way to solve a problem and (2) the best solution can and will change over time (so do everything you can to make it easy for whoever has to solve your problem in the future to do so). Lastly, I learned how to function in an Agile style of development which would be crucial for virtually all of my future SW development endeavors.