About me

Hi my name is Carlos Gonzalez and I hail from a medium sized town in El Paso TX, the least Texas bit of Texas.

As a kid I immediately gravitated toward anything technological, anything with buttons. I was fascinated with the cause and effect of it all- doing this causes that, making a combination of these buttons produces this. This evolved into video games as a kid and then back to web design in high school during a fateful summer school session when I was trying to stay ahead of my credits (yes I gave up my summer to go to summer school). That class more clearly showed me how things like buttons on pages actually do things when you click them. And it was all just there written down for you to read. To read on any page on the internet!

In college I had the opportunity to study cyber security and information technology and the challenge of an ever evolving adversary caught my attention. I started an internship with the federal government to support these efforts and there was a need to make a small improvement on an internal portal and I thought “I know how to do that” so I fixed that one thing. And then this other thing. And then before I knew it making all these improvements to speed up and increase our team’s speed was all I could think of. I was lucky and was able to grow that position into doing web development full time and leading a team that really told me “yes this is what I want to be doing, making things.”

Years later now working at one of the largest tech companies in the world I can see that my passion has always been in the point where technology and people meet. Today for me that means providing an awesome user experience as a frontend engineer in cyber security working in React.

It's been a crazy ride and I keep learning more every day. There's more that I don't know than I do. There's points in my life where that has scared me. Showing up to a job or a meeting and knowing you may not be the smartest person there or questioning whether you belong there. But I try to remind myself now that staying curious, staying open to opportunities, and staying passionate has driven me to where I am today and as long as I keep doing those three things I know there's no way I can fail by any measure that truly matters.

Outside of work I have a few interests that have stuck around for quite a bit:

I have a passion for building Legos

Star Wars is one of the first movies that opened my eyes to the magic of movies

I have been playing Destiny for 10 years with my clan of friends

Amusement Parks not just amuse me but amuse my brain, I like to see how things were engineered to create a certain experience

And family, both the one I was born with and the one I've found along the way, are the most important thing to me.