Hey! I'm Justin Largo. I'm a well rounded software engineer with an emphasis in full stack web applications with a hint of cross platform deployments. My main languages are Python, Java, Javascript/Typescript, and Dart. I like to use either Django, FastAPI, Next.js, or Flutter for my applications.
While I started learning how to program in middle school with Action Script and Flash Games, I formally started working as a software engineer in November of 2019. I was working on a research grant with my alma mater, Siena College on a secret AI related project for the Department of Defense and GE. The role had me building out user interfaces and other frontend related code in Java and Swing and allowed for me to get first hand experience in the SDLC.
After that, I started working for IBM and z/TPF as an intern in 2020 where I helped write features for the Middleware & Security, Database, and Tooling squad. After that summary, they extended an offer post graduation to join IBM as well as work part-time throughout the school year on side projects for them. After graduating Siena College in May 2021 with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in entrepreneurship, I joined IBM full-time as a software engineer.
After another year with z/TPF, I was given an offer to join IBM's CIO organization in their network security team. This was my first transition to DevOps and AI as an ML Engineer on the product offering Virginia or AskiCDNet as it later became. The goal for Virginia was to use watsonx's generative ai and natural language capabilities to build an AI assistant that could easily fix networking issues for IBM Consultants. It worked out pretty well for my scaffolding DevOps pipelines with IBM's Cirrus CI/CD Solution that's built on OpenShift. I also wrote quite a bit of Java and Spring Boot REST APIs used to communicate with watsonx, Service Now, and Palo Alto Prisma APIs.
After a year working as a ML Engineer, a major organizational change occurred where my team was moved from the CIO to Consulting. A perk of this, was that I was named to become the Technical Architect for AskiCDNet which gave me lots of experience with technical leadership, hiring engineers, and working with cross functional teams. My biggest contribution as the Technical Architect was building a RAG Pipeline from scratch with it's own proprietary web crawler. After 2 years of development, we developed a solid assistant with 99% uptime and a 90% reduction in sev 1 incidents. But as consulting goes, our project came to an end which led me to another interesting role within IBM.
In October of 2024, I joined IBM Z again under the Customer Test team. As a member of Customer Test and z/PET (Platform Evaluation Test), my role is building out automated tests with Galasa and Jenkins to make sure all z/OS features work in a customer simulated environment. Additionally, I will be leveraging my generative AI experience to become the new z/OS AI testing focal in z/PET.
At IBM, I was involved in the patenting process and have a few to my name. However, only one of them is currently published. If you want to see my inventions as they come, you can find them here.
If you want a quick list of my published work (not complete due to legal reasons):
If you want to talk hobbies, I have a few that I gravitate to. I'm a pretty active person, so I like to lift weights or train MMA with an emphasis on Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I've been doing that for a few years and I'm currently a blue belt with half a dozen competitions under my belt.
I also really like spending time with my dog and my girlfriend Nereida. This usually ends up walking, cooking, playing video games, building puzzles or legos together. Also shout out to the occasional trashy reality TV show (looking at you 90 day fiance).