Software With No Undo Button

I came up building, and I never stopped

I’m working on my second bachelor’s degree, and I came up through the software industry the long way. I started as a mobile developer at Prometheus Group, building SAP apps across Android, iOS, and Windows, then pivoted into embedded systems because that’s where the problems got more interesting. Now I write flight software for CubeSats at the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory, working with NASA’s F Prime framework on real missions. The common thread is simple: I love to build. Satellite firmware, web apps, a little tool to print my parents’ passport photos — whatever interesting problem is in front of me, I want to take it apart and make something that works.

Why software, and why the hard version of it

What keeps me in software engineering is leverage. One person who writes careful code can take a real problem off a lot of people’s plates. I saw it early: a Selenium script I wrote let my whole QA team skip a tedious login, and a no-server web app I built let my parents print passport photos for a dollar instead of trusting some sketchy site with their pictures. Small stuff, but it helped real people and I did it myself. I could have aimed that at a comfortable Big Tech job. I didn’t, because I’d rather spend it on problems that are genuinely hard and actually matter. Space is the clearest one I’ve found. Flight software is unforgiving — once a satellite is deployed there’s no patch, no SSH, and no easy undo button — and that constraint is a big part of why I wanted the job.

What I want to get good at

I’m early enough to be specific about what I’m missing. I want to go deeper on F Prime and on the testing and verification discipline that lets a team trust software it can’t easily fix. I also care a lot about satellite cybersecurity. The more I work with these systems, the more I notice that software security tends to be an afterthought once a satellite is already in orbit, and proper command and control is what keeps an adversary from using or disrupting our assets in space. That’s a problem I want to be good at. On top of the technical side, I want to get serious about software process — configuration management, code review, CI/CD — because that’s what turns one person being clever into a team that ships something reliable. It’s a big reason I’m treating software engineering as a real discipline and not just as coding.

Why the Space Force, and why Hawaii

I come from a military family. My dad was Army, my sisters are officers, and I moved across the country from North Carolina to Hawaii to be near family and finish this degree. Commissioning into the Space Force in 2027 isn’t a detour from my software career — it’s the point of it. I want to work on systems where reliability isn’t optional and the mission is real, lead the people who build them, and eventually bring that experience back home to Hawaii. Space is, in my opinion, the last peaceful frontier, and I’d like to spend my career helping keep it that way. The through-line from a $1 passport tool to a satellite constellation is the same: software is leverage, I’d rather point it at hard problems that help people, and in this line of work you usually only get one shot to get it right.