From a Pizza Hut delivery guy serving as a shift lead to working two summers as an IT team member at Westside School district setting up cameras and new TVs, repairing and wiping chrome books for the following school year, to working as the Lead Programmer at Brenkman & Company, Jarom has been here since 2021.

In 2019, he experienced his first interaction with the company as an intern training AI models. This experience allowed him to explore his passion for programming as he began to self-teach himself using YouTube videos (Brackey) and gaming development (Unity). Eventually, he viewed the videos less and less, as he expressed: “As I got better, I started to look at examples and how the code worked.”

Now, he programs in the following languages: Rust, C, C++, Java, Java Script, C#, and Python. His role has placed him in projects with drones, websites, networking (using Rust to communicate wirelessly between a drone and a station), and hardware development (creating some custom board projects).

The drone project has been his highlight in working for the company so far, as he explains in detail:

“So, for the Drone project, I had to get my part 107 license. That is a drone pilot’s license. I coded a microcontroller in C to get data from a sensor and save it to an SD card. The microcontroller was connected to an SBC companion computer using UART. The UART connection was used to tell the microcontroller to start and stop recording and to send GPS data to the microcontroller. The microcontroller would in turn send sensor data to the Companion computer.

The companion computer had a few jobs. First, it handled the connection with the microcontroller. It took pictures and got data from another sensor over CAN. It would save this data to be processed later.

Lastly was the ground station. The ground station would get its data from the drone and display it neatly for the user to read. It also was used to edit settings and to stop/start data collection.

The Companion computer and Ground station code was written in Rust.” He also added: “The Spec website is another fun one I’ve been working on.”

If asked why he joined, he will respond:

“Because it’s a fun job. That’s really it. I don’t care about the money; I just care about if it’s fun or not!”