Woodworking

For my entire life I have loved building things: blocks, sand castles, legos, robots.

As I grew older my love for building became a passion for woodworking.

My original shop came from taking over half of my childhood home garage. I now have a full blown shop back home in Virginia, and spend many of my vacation hours there, sawing, hammering and sanding away on projects of mine.

Below are some of the many personal wood projects I have done over the years.

A wooden planter in my high school garage shop

A walnut table top after surfacing and oiling

Oak tabletop being glued-up

Planting Bench with Dirt grate

A walnut and maple brick pattern cutting board

Cherry side table with walnut-inlay

BG Woodcrafts

BG Woodcrafts is the name I use when selling woodworking pieces commercially.

The first batch of products was manufactured betweenDec '22 - Jan '23.

Some of my products were sold on Etsy, and some are still being sold at local stores in Charlottesville, Virginia

Below are some of the products I created and sold:

Wall art "Virginia" made from repurposed pallet boards

Oak, Ash, and Walnut "Live-Edge" Serving Boards

My "stock room" of all the boards and things I sold

Wall mounted bottle openers with magnetic bottle-cap catch

For Hire Handy Work

With my love for fixing and building things I have taken up the hobby of being an hourly handyman for my local community!

I am more then happy to help you or someone you know
- Build or Repair Furniture
- Move Furniture and Belongings
- Wall Mount things
- Setup Computer Equipment
- Teach Seniors how to use their devices
- Help with a DIY Home Improvement Project

Me in my early teens excited to receive power drills for Christmas

My current "standard" tool set I take to handy-man calls!

Cooking

Cooking is one of the many avenues I am able to show my creativity and has been one of the most valuable skills I have learned.

Below I have left a series of photos to showcase some of the things I have made. These photos are a mix of things I made in a personal at-home environment, as well as a commercial environment while working as a line cook at various restaurants.

A Dessert Special I made while working as a Line Cook at a Country Club in VA

A batch of homemade sourdough bread I made while working at as a line cook in Virginia

My favorite at-home go-to of steak, rice, and truffled potatoes, with chimmichurri!

Robotics and 3D Printers

Robotics was introduced to me my freshman year of high school via FIRST.
FIRST was able to provide me complex engineering learning like no other through FTC and FRC.

My Junior and Senior Year of high school I led my High school robotics program. Very few things have taught me as much as that experience.

I continue to advocate for this style of education and hope to mentor and teach other teams in the future. Nowadays I continue my passion for this through projects like working on 3D printers, or building my own electronic/robotics contraptions!

Below are some of the many photos from my time that. I hope it can give you a valuable understanding of FIRST and my robotics experiences

My High-school Robotics Organizations FRC Robot from second year running the organization

My High-school Robotics Organizations FTC Robot, from my first year running the organization

Early photo of a 3D print on a homemade
Pursa-i3 style printer

My High-school Robotics robot from my very first year learning robotics

A 3D Printer from High-School which I used to teach others about 3D printing as well as one of the many used with robotics

Finance

I have always had a very strong passion in entrepreneurship and business. As I have grown up, honed my math skills, and matured I have found an interest in finance and investing.

I have spent a lot of my time learning finance/investing terms and equations and love following finance news.

I am in the process of python+web application called "OrbitInvest".
This application utilizes Bank API's and authentication process to automatically connect to a users account and pull needed info to perform complex local analytics and provide the user with a far more in-depth portfolio analytic dashboard.

I am working on polishing the edges and packaging this as an open source app for others to use. Below are some photos showcasing the functionality

Currently it Operates entirely locally by authenticating to Schwab's API, Authenticating with the users information, and extracting and transforming the needed data from the Schwab data structure into my own data structure.

This allows abstraction for any future Bank/Brokerage APIs to be compatible with the equivalent authentication and data extraction layer. All data is housed in sqlite and is iteratively processed taking advantage of First In First Out to NOT process the data entirely with every new transaction, only what is needed for updates.

The data visualization is done through pythons Plotly and Plotly Dash Open Source Modules. These provide a python based web development framework in which I form with needed plots and format the data viz app with a mix of Python, Html, and CSS.

All of this is connected through a universal PYQT6 based GUI in which a user can both authenticate, update transactions, view the data viz app, and more!

Its own website and public GitHub repo are in progress!

A Page showcasing one of the many views of the Data Viz Application, This specific pages showcases the interface as we'll as the Profit/Loss Bubble chart

A Page showcasing the treemap profit loss charts as well as a waterfall time based cumulative profit loss chart

A showcase of just a little bit of the large amount of code compiled to build this application

The operating system agnostic GUI menu to wrap the authentication, database access, and plotting functionalities together