I work in IT at a large private research university, in the kind of environment where technology operates at a scale most people never really have to think about. I've spent much of my career working with systems, security, troubleshooting, projects, and the practical challenge of making technology work for real people. While technology has been part of my professional life for years, actually building software myself is much newer territory.
My path here hasn't been completely straightforward. Earlier in my career, I spent a few years working with a web design and digital business consulting company. I wasn't the person writing the code. My role was closer to figuring out what a client was actually trying to accomplish, helping turn an incomplete idea into something more concrete, communicating that direction to the people building it, and then reviewing and refining what came back. I didn't think much about that experience for a long time, but I've started to recognize how much of that same process shows up in the way I build things today.
I started learning AI engineering because I've been fascinated by AI for years and wanted to understand more of what was happening underneath the surface. That meant learning things I had little experience with, including Python, APIs, models, RAG, agents, and the fundamentals of software development. Somewhere along the way, the goal changed. I stopped being satisfied with only understanding how these things worked and started wondering what I could make with them.
That question has taken me further than I expected. Course exercises turned into experiments. Experiments turned into projects of my own. A family tech-support joke became Relative Tech Support. An idea about making fitness more engaging started becoming Fitness Journey. Eventually I needed somewhere for all of those things to live, and Rudy B Creative became another project in itself.
I've also had to reconsider what it means to be creative. For most of my life, creativity meant art to me: painting, drawing, making something beautiful with your hands. Those were things other people in my family could do, and I never really put myself in that category. I'm starting to think my definition was too narrow. I like taking an idea that doesn't quite exist yet, asking what it could become, figuring out how the pieces might fit together, and then working through the decisions required to make it real. I'm still figuring out what to call that, but I'm comfortable calling it creative now.
AI is an important part of how I'm learning and building, but I'm not particularly interested in using it to remove myself from the process. I use it to ask questions, explore ideas, challenge assumptions, understand unfamiliar concepts, write and debug code, organize thoughts, and sometimes see possibilities I wouldn't have found on my own. The tools can accelerate an incredible amount of work. I still want the decisions, judgment, responsibility, and ultimately the direction of that work to remain mine.
I don't know exactly where any of this leads. I enjoy the career I already have, and I'm not trying to manufacture a story where I've suddenly figured out what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life. Maybe some of these projects stay experiments. Maybe one becomes a product or a business. Maybe learning to build simply changes what I'm capable of doing in the career I already have. I'm interested in all of those possibilities.
For now, I'm following curiosity, building what I find, and learning out loud along the way.