Blackairplane was an exceptional place to work with a team that I both enjoyed and learned a great deal from. Originally hired to fill a contract role with the CDC for the Covid response in March 2021, I went on to spend over two more years with the team after the role with the CDC wound down.
My role with the CDC centered around making improvements to the underlying management systems behind delivering content to many of the .gov sites the public is familiar with including cdc.gov. One of my highlights was working on a project to completely ingest another agency site currently using Joomla. The migration process involved the ETL of Joomla into the same backend systems powering the CDC and others. For this role I was granted a confidential level security clearance through DHHS (expired).
Following my role with the CDC, I was asked to learn laravel to assist in other projects with Blackairplane. After picking up laravel I worked on and even took lead on several projects implementing laravel for various customers. Throughout this time I also picked up vue3 as a frontend technology as well as obtaining my Stripe Developer Certification.
In early 2023 I was given the side task of building out an AI tool that could take recordings or transcriptions of zoom meetings and make that data available to a model for querying. From January 2023 until my departure I continued to develop this project and improve the underlying data gathering. When II left the backend was connected to slack through a bot that could ingest messages as well as allow control and share data. It was tied into 6 services GitLab, GitHub, Zoom, ClickUp and slack. All running on a series of laravel servers and relying on pgVector for affordable storage.
The blog is mostly here to serve ass a simple way to link to long-form content on the site. There won't be any breaking news or tell-all stories here. Just good ole fashioned boring crap no one wants to read.