My portfolio highlights three of my most marketable skills, drawn from independent network design and live event operations, solo iOS software development, and hands-on business operations. Each skill below is supported by three real artifacts with an explanation of the problem, my action, and the result.<\/p>\n\n
Jump to a skill:<\/strong> Skill 1: Network Infrastructure Design & Segmentation<\/a> | Skill 2: Software Development<\/a> | Skill 3: Independent Business Operations & Stakeholder Communication<\/a><\/p>\n\n Network infrastructure design is central to cybersecurity because a network’s topology and segmentation determine how contained a breach can be and how reliably services stay available. The three artifacts below range from coursework designs to a live network I have operated at scale for over a decade.<\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> For an independent case analysis, I needed to design a complete wired network and security policy for a four-story, 48-room school building that kept staff, student, management, and printer\/AV traffic separated, with no horizontal cable run exceeding Category 6A distance limits.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I placed one Main Distribution Frame and three Intermediate Distribution Frames across the building, each centered on a vertical riser so it could serve the rooms stacked above and below it on all four floors. I specified Cat6A horizontal cabling (96 outlets across 48 rooms) with a 10 Gigabit OM4 fiber backbone linking the MDF to each IDF, five managed Layer-3 PoE switches providing 144 access ports (50% more than required), and a UniFi Dream Machine Pro firewall enforcing four VLANs — staff, students, network management, and printers\/AV — with explicit inter-VLAN policy (students blocked from staff and management traffic, staff access to management restricted to an IT-admin host group, deny-by-default on all inbound WAN traffic).<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> The finished design includes a scaled floor plan, cable-run and port-headroom calculations, a full firewall policy, and an itemized materials budget totaling $11,685. It demonstrates my ability to plan enterprise-scale topology and segmentation that limits lateral movement during a security incident, and to deliver numbers a decision-maker could act on.<\/p>\n View the full case analysis (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> I was assigned a structured cabling design for Constant Hall, a two-floor academic building with 188 rooms, where the goal was a reliable extended-star cabling plan with an accurate materials estimate.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I selected one Equipment Room and three Telecom Closets in interior, windowless service rooms — one pair stacked on the first floor and one pair stacked on the second — so each closet uplinks to the Equipment Room through a central vertical riser. I derived a pixel-to-foot scale directly from the floor plan and measured cable runs along actual corridor and tray routes rather than straight-line distances to size the Cat6A plenum cable order with a 10% wastage allowance.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> The design called for 376 horizontal cables totaling roughly 42,543 feet of Cat6A plenum cable (43 one-thousand-foot spools) at a total material cost of $19,264. This project shows I can translate a real building’s physical layout and scale into a practical, budgeted structured-cabling plan, not just the final topology.<\/p>\n View the full case analysis (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> The Holiday Duals, the winter event of the Virginia Challenge — a nonprofit wrestling tournament my family runs and FloSports streams nationally — needed a live network supporting 36 simultaneous mat stations and networked track clocks for over 1,000 wrestlers across three competition days in Virginia Beach, VA, with no IT department, no vendor, and no fallback.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> Since age 13, I have planned and run the tournament’s full network stack every year: running and dressing Ethernet cable and distribution boxes to all 36 mat positions before the first whistle, delivering and verifying networked track clocks over Ethernet at every mat, standing up and operating the streaming and scoring server that feeds the FloSports broadcast, and troubleshooting live faults — link failures, clock desync, cable faults — across all three days with no escalation path.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> The tournament runs 36 concurrent networked stations reliably for three consecutive days on a national broadcast, showing that I can take the same topology and segmentation skills from my coursework designs and operate them live, at scale, under real-time pressure with sole accountability for the outcome.<\/p>\n View the full write-up (DOCX)<\/a><\/p>\n\n Software development matters in cybersecurity because understanding how systems are actually built makes me a stronger analyst of the systems I did not build myself. Thrive, an iOS wellness app I designed, coded, and published to the App Store entirely on my own, is the primary evidence of this skill.<\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> I wanted to build and ship a real, published product rather than a class exercise — a wellness app that blocks distracting apps like social media, streaming, and games until the user finishes daily health tasks.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I designed, built, and published Thrive as the sole developer, taking it from an idea through Apple’s App Store review process to a live public release.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> Thrive is live today at apps.apple.com — Thrive<\/a>, the simplest possible evidence that the work shipped, passed Apple’s review, and exists for real users rather than only as a class submission.<\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> Thrive needed to work as one coherent product across the iPhone, the home\/lock screen, and the Apple Watch, while enforcing app blocking through a restricted system capability.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I built the app in Swift and SwiftUI with a SwiftData persistence layer, split across four targets — the main app, the ThriveShield blocking extension (built on Apple’s restricted Family Controls entitlement), a home\/lock-screen widget, and an Apple Watch companion — all sharing one source of truth through an App Group container, and integrated HealthKit so workout and hydration tasks are verified against real health data.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> This artifact documents real engineering tradeoffs I made to ship, including storing friend codes locally instead of building a backend server, showing I can reason about and justify architecture decisions, not just describe features.<\/p>\n View the full architecture write-up (DOCX)<\/a><\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> Shipping Thrive also meant explaining it clearly enough that a stranger would trust it with their health data and a subscription payment, with no design or marketing team to help.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I designed, wrote, and deployed thrivelock.com myself — the hero message, an eight-feature breakdown, a three-step “how it works” section that mirrors the app’s real onboarding, transparent pricing across four tiers, an honest FAQ on enforcement and data privacy, and linked legal pages.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> The site is live at thrivelock.com<\/a> and demonstrates that shipping a product includes the pitch as well as the code — product decisions, copywriting, and UX thinking, not just Swift.<\/p>\n\n This skill covers everything required to keep an independent project running once the technical build is done: operations, marketing, and communicating clearly with the people who depend on the outcome. I consider this my strongest skill because it is the one I have been developing the longest, starting at age 13.<\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> Once Thrive was live, I needed a measurable way to acquire paid users beyond organic App Store discovery, with attribution accurate enough that spending decisions could be based on data rather than intuition.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I evaluated and selected AppsFlyer as Thrive’s mobile measurement partner, integrated it via Swift Package Manager, mapped trial and subscription events to Meta and TikTok ad campaigns, and diagnosed a broken paywall-vendor attribution integration — routing purchase events through AppsFlyer’s Purchase Connector instead of spending against numbers I couldn’t trust.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> This artifact shows I can run a real paid-acquisition function solo: choosing vendors, catching a silent vendor failure before it cost real money, and making monetization calls like extending the free trial from three days to seven.<\/p>\n View the full acquisition plan (DOCX)<\/a><\/p>\n\n Problem:<\/strong> Cold advertising alone wasn’t going to reach the audiences most likely to need Thrive, so I needed creators whose existing audiences already trusted them on phone dependency and wellness habits.<\/p>\n Action:<\/strong> I segmented target audiences into three groups, built a five-creator shortlist chosen for content fit rather than follower count, and wrote my own plain, no-script outreach message offering a free lifetime subscription plus paid posts in exchange for honest content.<\/p>\n Result:<\/strong> This artifact demonstrates stakeholder communication with people who owe me nothing — reading what a specific audience will respond to and saying the true thing in a way they can hear it.<\/p>\n
\n\nSkill 1: Network Infrastructure Design & Segmentation<\/h2>\n
Artifact 1 of 3 — Maury High School Network & Security Design<\/h3>\n
Artifact 2 of 3 — Constant Hall Structured Cabling Design<\/h3>\n
Artifact 3 of 3 — Holiday Duals Tournament Network Operations<\/h3>\n
\n\nSkill 2: Software Development (iOS End-to-End Ownership)<\/h2>\n
Artifact 1 of 3 — Thrive on the App Store<\/h3>\n
Artifact 2 of 3 — Thrive Technical Architecture Overview<\/h3>\n
Artifact 3 of 3 — Thrive Product Website (thrivelock.com)<\/h3>\n
\n\nSkill 3: Independent Business Operations & Stakeholder Communication<\/h2>\n
Artifact 1 of 3 — Thrive Growth & Paid User Acquisition Plan<\/h3>\n
Artifact 2 of 3 — Thrive Creator Outreach Campaign<\/h3>\n