Education and Early Career
For as long as he can remember, Peter LaGow has been fascinated by technology. Having grown up around computers, Peter took to tinkering with them by exploring the realm of coding at a young age. He had gained so much experience this way that, by age 10, he had written his first piece of malware to temporarily hijack his little sister’s laptop (as older brothers do). Peter was grounded for a month and, in retaliation, he dedicated the next 13 years of his life to earning a degree in computer science.
Peter LaGow began his undergraduate career at Western Washington University, working as an independent consultant in his free time.
He successfully configured and maintained business networks, and built hardware and software solutions based on clients’ individual needs.
Peter landed his first full-time programming role while in school, serving as a Web Designer for Reference Media, Inc. He was primarily responsible for rehauling a full-stack framework; some of his other responsibilities included decrypting >120,000 files impacted by a form of the Crysis ransomware virus, and subsequently writing and implementing a full security policy.
Career and Experience
Through such experiences and his undergraduate schooling, Peter LaGow has developed expertise in a number of technologies, leveraging C, Java, Python, and SQL to optimize labor efficiency and deliver impactful results to business operations.
Now, Peter LaGow serves as a Senior Business Consultant for HighJump Software, a company that he has grown with since graduating from Western. He started there as an Implementation Consultant, through which he wrote voice-recognition software to increase warehouse accuracy and efficiency; created AES-256 modules for proprietary software; and built a neural network and API to predict order priority with ever-increasing accuracy.
Through his years of experience, Peter has come to appreciate the juxtaposition of creativity and logic in technology. Computers do exactly what they’re told to do; creative use of their instruction set is what continually moves us forward.
Whether it’s identifying a potential attack vector in a system or training a single AI model that behaves differently depending on the data it learns from, the creative use of logic is what fascinates Peter about computer science.
Overall, Peter LaGow holds a deep admiration for technology and the ways in which it continues to impact our society. Whether we like it or not, the technological landscape perpetually changes, fueling more of our everyday activities than we may realize. We should study and understand it in order to arm ourselves with the best information possible going forward.
On this website, Peter will be sharing his perspective on emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, neural networks, cybersecurity, and much more. To glean further insight, be sure to visit his blog page.