Kyle Barnes

I'm a Computer Science student at The University of Texas at Dallas, minoring in Business Administration and graduating in May 2028. I earned an Associate of Science from Angelina College in 2025 while beginning my B.S., and I completed my FAA private pilot certificate in January 2024.

Those two things are not separate tracks. Flight training is full of problems that software is good at: memorizing a large body of material on a schedule, decoding weather that is published in a format designed for teletype, and running weight-and-balance arithmetic that has to be correct every time. I build the tools I wanted while I was a student pilot.

The other half of my background is hands-on IT. I work as a facility attendant at UT Dallas Gaming & Esports, where I set up AV for events and keep 80+ workstations with NVIDIA RTX 4080 SUPER GPUs and 32 GB RAM running. I provide Tier 1 hardware and network troubleshooting during live tournaments. Troubleshooting hardware in front of a person who is waiting on you is a different skill from writing code, and it has made me a lot more careful about what actually happens when software fails.