Jaylen Scott

From biology to software

What stuck from the lab was a habit more than a subject. You write down what you expect to happen, then build the thing that would show you if you were wrong. Most of test engineering is that same move pointed at software, which is why the switch felt less like a career change than it probably looked from outside.

I picked up the computer science sideways and then went back to fill it in properly: a master's at Lewis while working full time, and more recently an MBA at Illinois. The MBA was less about leaving engineering than about wanting to understand the business the software sits inside, which is usually the thing driving the deadlines nobody explains.

The homelab

Most of what I build outside work runs on a small setup at home. A TrueNAS box handles storage on a mirrored pool, a Proxmox host runs game servers and bots, a Raspberry Pi does DNS and monitoring, and a Mac handles local model inference. Nothing is exposed to the open internet. Everything is reached over a VPN.

The one rule I set for it is that the monitor does not live on the thing it monitors. The Pi watches the NAS, and a job on the NAS watches the Pi, so a box falling over produces an alert instead of silence. It is a hobby, but it is also the only place where I own every layer of the stack, and most of what I know about running things came from breaking it first.

Where I'm headed

Near term, I want to keep getting better at what I already do. Test engineering rewards depth, and I do not think I am done with it yet.

Alongside that, the work I want more of is developer tooling. The internal things engineers touch every day and complain about when they are bad. That has been my favorite part of every job I have had, and I would happily do it full time.

Further out I would like to own more of the why and not only the how. That is most of the reason for the MBA. I have no interest in stopping writing code, but I would like a real say in what gets built and who it is for.