My name is Kyle Hartson. I am developer from Cleveland, Ohio currently working as an Applications Engineer at Root Integrated Systems. My current work focuses on the configuration, testing and commissioning of audiovisual systems.
My Background
My original background in development stemmed from a few semesters of undergraduate computer science courses at Tufts University, covering topics in OOP and data structures taught in C++. Majoring in Chinese at Tufts, I found these courses piqued my interest in develoment and programming enough to make a switch into the field post graduation. I enrolled in Flatiron School’s 60-week immersive software engineering bootcamp and learned full-stack web development in Ruby on Rails and React, covering all facets of MCV architecture, including the design of backend resources such as ORMs and controllers using ActiveRecord in Sinatra. I completed 5 projects spanning from vanilla html/js to full stack Rails/React applications hosted and deployed to Render and Heroku.
Post graduation, I entered the IT field as a service desk technician at Flynn Group, resolving service incidents in domains ranging to hybrid AD/AAD, SAP to desktop support and network troubleshooting for Meraki cloud deployments. Since Flynn, I have worked at Root Integrated Systems as an Applciations Engineer II to configure and support integrated AV systems with technologies such as Q-SYS, Crestron, Visionary Solutions and Tesira. I also serve on the network coordination team, ensuring that our deployments integrate seamlessly in enterprise IT environments. These responsibilites include researching and communicating the technical networking and administrative needs to successfully deploy unified collaboration solutions such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Cisco Webex in an array of corporate infrastructures and administrative solutions. More recently, my work has also included supporting the interna softwares we deploy for the remote monitoring and management of our soluitions. These include Splunk, Crestron XiO, Q-SYS Reflect, Jabra+, Neat Pulse, among others. I have also spearheaded initiatives to revamp and modernize our internal documentation, working with a dedicated team to test and deploy Outline locally. Additionally, I am hoping to step into the role of architecting and maintaing a serverless data environment to develop the neccessary infrastructure to support our enterprise data needs, including ERP integrations and data warehousing using Azure.
My Interests and Projects
To maintain my development skills, I participate as actively as I can outside of work in projects with friends and colleagues. Examples to date include a hidden-markov driven Discord bot deployed on a local linux machine that serves text response generated from chat logs fetched from a server of 40 concurrent users, a Golang hackathon using the Encore backend framework, and working with a mentor of mine on an ASP.NET static web application with Azure function app dependencies deployed in a scalable Azure cloud instance. A full list of my recent projects and contributions can be found on my Github.
As a recent side project, I have taken to migrating my development environment from WSL2 to LMDE Cinnamon. I aim to use this machine to self-host any projects or tools I create, as well as to delve further into the Linux ecosystem. I have enjoyed getting to customize my own installation, taking some inspiration from the UNIX customization community, customizing tools such as Neovim and zsh to my liking.
I try to bring as much of software experience into AV as well - recent projects include a demo of Crestron CH5 compiler to port React Typescript projects to TSxx series touch panels and control system programming done in C#/Simpl#, as well as writing scripts and tools to automate our team’s workflow, writting in batch/CMD and Python.
Ask me about any of the recent projects I’ve listed here! I love to share what I’ve learned with others, and gain from their perspectives.
I have recently started this blog to port my resume and experience to an accessible format, as well as to structure some of my learning into articles that I write on here. I am currently working on porting some of my old Medium articles to this blog, after which point I can begin to write periodic updates regarding the projects and learning I am doing.
You can contact me via any of the links provided at the bottom of this webiste. Don’t hesitate to reach out!
Here’s me and my cat.
