I moved to Florida in October of 2023 and it was exciting knowing I was about to start a completely new chapter in my life on the opposite coast from where I grew up! So far, it's been an incredible experience. Ever seen the big plane with a spinning dome in Top Gun: Maverick? It's called the E-2D and that's what I work on! We're currently contracted with the US Navy to build a custom version, rebuilt from the ground up with extended compute from the domestic E-2 for the French military. We're super close with them and they visit pretty often from overseas with good vibes and usually a meal in downtown to go along with it!
In my first month at Northrop I was able to extend the existing codebase for our Cross Domain Solution (CDS) to include deserializing binary messages over TCP/IP allowing for validation of messages that were allowed through the CDS rulesets. This was critical to the project and ALL further work done on the CDS was built on top of the code I wrote, using it as a foundation. It's pretty cool knowing my work was immediately impactful and will be used for decades to come and by multiple countries! The changes I made meant penetration testing for the CDS went from taking 4+ hours of manually sending and testing each message and its fuzzed versions to less than 10 minutes with full automation and validation. The CDS is built with Python.
This is critical to meeting our contract requirements with the Navy as the CDS exists between almost every computerized connection on the aircraft. If there's a network connection between two digital components you can bet there's one of our CDS's sitting in the middle guarding against uncleared classified data from spilling over into insecure unclassified environments. Every single CDS is also built like a tank and tamper proof to the max! I have to keep all this info vague as I can lose my Department of Defense (DoD) security clearance for sharing anything too detailed.
For the work I've done on developing additional functionality for the CDS as well as revising our internal documentation to align with the ruleset definitions I have received 4 Bravo Awards, with 2 being endorsed and recognized by upper management overseeing our entire sector alongside a significant monetary reward. I'm very proud of what I've accomplish in my first year!
I also manage all aspects of the project development lifecycle for the team as I volunteered to be Scrum Master. I run every meeting and also help write up tickets and keep our team organized and on track for contract deliverables. I have also begun working on MSSS, our E-2 simulation tool for comparing our Mission Computer and Display (MCD) against scenarios designed to mock real world military operations. In my spare time, I am working on modernizing our tech stack with deeper integration into brand new CI/CD pipelines and leveraging containerization technology to speed up our builds, deployments, and integration tests. Go podman!
I'm looking forward to doing more cool stuff in 2025 :)