You are about to spend an hour a week building with someone. Fair that you know who.
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I am Roy. Senior cloud engineer and manager at Leidos, sixteen years in tech, and no degree.
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My first real job was picking up rocks and debris on a property. Construction was what I could get at the time. What it taught me was that if you work hard you can move up, and I did, until my body made that plan stop working.
Hospitality was next. I could not talk to people, so I took a job that forced me to. Physical security for hotels and condos, then operations manager. Facing people and solving their problems all day is where I actually learned to do it.
Then a support desk, with no tech experience at all. I bridged the gap with what hospitality had taught me, and it was still a completely different game.
Three careers and about twenty jobs later, I am a senior engineer and a manager. All of it self-taught, on the job, by building.
Would I change any of it? No.
I thought AI was for people with PhDs, locked in a lab somewhere. It is not. It is another way of learning, and you get at it the same way you get at anything else, by building with it.
Since November 2025 I have built over 170 projects, around 80 of them AI. It changed how I work in my day job and in my own businesses.
Am I an expert? No. I am 10+ months in and building every day. That is the whole point of this room: I am a little further down the same road you are on, and we cover the rest of it together.
A father and a husband. I run two small businesses on the side, real estate and advisory. I have competed in sport most of my life, six years of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and these days club shooting competition.
Competing is why the dojo works the way it does. Standing up in front of people and being watched while you work is uncomfortable, and doing it anyway is what turns nerves into confidence. That is what the stage is for.