Hi, I’m Robert

Most trade grades start and end with an analyst's judgment. I wanted one that could show its work, so I built understandball.com: a live NBA trade evaluator that grades each side against what that team is actually trying to do, contending or rebuilding, rather than against a single idea of value.

The scoring engine is fully deterministic. No model inference anywhere in the scoring path, which means the same trade always produces the same grade and the site can explain how it got there. 9,129 tests cover that engine and the salary cap rules it enforces, and they run in a GitHub Actions pipeline.

It implements the 2023 CBA properly: both aprons, tiered salary matching, the second apron aggregation ban and frozen first round picks.

The NBA is the league that is built. Each league declares whether its own data is live, empty or unbuilt, so the others are scaffolded and their grades are withheld until the data behind them is real. A grade nobody can trace is worse than no grade at all.

Before a third party API expired I designed and ran a data capture pipeline that archived its data across 23 sports.

The goal underneath all of it: I want to work in an NBA front office. UnderstandBall is where I am learning to build software for basketball decisions.

I am a software developer intern at Motio, a data analytics company out of Dallas, working remote. Most of my time goes to Purge Pilot, a data retention service in Java, Spring Boot, React and PostgreSQL, where I own the helpdesk and CRM connectors end to end. OAuth 2.0 with token caching, rate limit backoff, query translation.

I found and fixed three separate causes of silent record loss in keyset pagination running over a search index that lags its own writes. Nothing crashed. Nothing errored. Records just quietly did not come back, which is the worst kind of bug in a system whose whole job is deciding what to delete. I also wrote down the exact point where the guarantee stops holding.

I built the operator console's frontend out from a designer's mockup into reusable components, and introduced Vitest and Testing Library where the frontend had no test setup at all. On the backend I wrote roughly 40% of the test suite and shipped 14 database migrations against a trunk shared with the team.

For two years I was a Community Assistant at Chauncey Square, a 150-unit, 380-bed student housing property. I closed more than 25 twelve-month leases, over $300,000 in signed value at roughly $13,000 a contract, tracking every lead in Salesforce from first inquiry to signature.

The leasing was the measurable slice. The rest of the job was the front of the office: whoever walked in or called, the model apartment and the office opened and closed every day, a walk of the property for curb appeal, resident events, marketing on and around campus, and social media, where I was asked for the ideas as well as to appear in it. A manager was on site most of the time. On the weekends the CAs worked there was none, and for long stretches the assistant general manager post sat vacant, so the CAs ran the office and more of it landed on us.

The harder conversations were with parents. The student signs the lease and the parent decides, and a lot of the job was giving an anxious parent a real reason to feel their kid would be safe there.

Community Assistants carried a real on-call rotation: one week at a time, rotating among the CAs, holidays included. I also learned maintenance triage in the first-responder sense: stabilise a problem so maintenance arrived to something that had not got worse, or resolve it so they never had to come.

Turn was its own month. Most residents moved out on July 31 and new students arrived for classes around August 16, so the whole property changed hands in about two weeks: scrubbing apartments, moving furniture, and watching vendors so residents' belongings stayed safe and the work was up to code. Thirteen-hour days. The rest of the year it was twenty hours a week alongside a full course load, for two years.

In the summer of 2022 I ran Dive Division's Coral Estates site as its only instructor for most of the season: all of the teaching and the guided diving, and the shop's daily operations around them. I was alone at the shop on my second day. I certified more than 50 students that season and led several hundred guided dives, and I finished the summer as an MSDT.

The shop was mine to open and close: customer intake, scheduling, sales, reconciling the cash in Odoo, securing the site around every dive departure, and the equipment maintenance in between. Three days a week I was there alone; the other four, with one office staff member.

About a month before I left, the shop hired a second, more senior instructor. One day I let her take a dive and did not think anything of it. Then I was told: we want you to take all the dives.

I was also a certified Emergency First Response Instructor, teaching CPR, emergency oxygen and AED use, including Care for Children. The summer before Coral Estates I had taught freelance at two other Curaçao dive centres, tracking each student's progress toward certification.