Welcome!

I'm Sam! This is my (forever work-in-progress) personal website, to showcase some of my hobby projects. I'm a computer scientist with a passion for:

Low-level systems programming
Embedded systems
Software reverse engineering and pentesting
Software engineering

This website was created "from scratch"; check out this blog post for a (highly simplified) technical breakdown!

I love working on projects that challenge me to learn and apply new concepts from the ground up. I try to limit my usage of software libraries or 3rd party tools until after I have a strong a grasp on the fundamentals myself. I've found this approach to be incredibly fulfilling and rewarding; and, it makes it so much easier to pick up new tools quickly and use them to their fullest potential.

To that end, nothing on this website was created with AI, or with the assistance of AI (including all showcased projects). I talk about this more in this blog post.

My Background

I got my B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering in 2020 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
I then spent 2 years working as a systems engineer for a global, high-profile aeronautics engineering and manufacturing company.
In 2023, I moved on to pursue a full-time Computer-Science graduate program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; I acquired my M.S. in Computer Science in 2025.

For work, I developed a codebase in Python for processing huge amounts of flight data: tens of thousands of flights, each with tens of thousands of data points, each with several thousand sensor parameters ranging from simple metrics like airspeed and altitude, to finer details like static air temperature at the inlet of the engine's combustion chamber.

I created a toolchain which leveraged that codebase to generate "representative" flight profiles for subsets of all flight data, to answer questions like:

"What does an 'average' flight look like?"

"What about if we only consider flights where the aircraft:
experienced abnormal rate-of-descent,

during full throttle,

while below 20,000 feet?"

These representative profiles were used across the entire engineering division of the company to perform durability analyses on nearly every component of our product. Because this process was so sensitive to the whole product's design, it involved regular, close collaboration with executives within the company and within the US government, for regulatory oversight.