Gary Kuepper // Long Beach, CA
About Me
I’m an Environmental Control Systems Analysis Engineer at Boeing. I investigate in-service problems so the cabin stays breathable at 35,000 feet. I got here the long way.
How I Got Here
I failed a programming course in high school and took that as settled for about ten years. Two mechanical engineering degrees later I was certifying pipe fittings for submarine programs, in a workplace I’ll describe politely. Narrow work, a low ceiling, and nothing about it worth staying for.
I taught myself Python on the job and realized I’d been wrong. Went back for a CS degree at CSUMB, nights and weekends with a full-time job the whole way, and finished in April 2026. The ambition wasn’t new. I’d just stopped treating the years as something that was happening to me.
Long Beach, CA · 33.77°N 118.19°W
Experience
Education
What I’m Building
ggGridRunner is a semi-autonomous rover with an STM32 brain and a PS4 controller behind the wheel. GG Swarm started as my capstone and outlived the semester, a GNN-based drone swarm design that moved from simulation toward hardware. Both exist because I wanted to know whether the thing I designed would survive contact with a real motor, a real battery, and real wind. The swarm work has somewhere to land now: ggSkylight, a small business around synchronized drone light shows. That’s the part that refuses to stay theoretical, since a show either flies or it doesn’t.
HexMaster is the odd one out: a Discord bot that runs stockpile logistics for Foxhole groups. It reads inventory screenshots with OCR, keeps the counts in Postgres, and tells a coordinated group what they’re short of before it matters. A logistics problem with none of the real consequences, which makes it a good place to be wrong.
Beyond the Code
When I’m not at a terminal or a workbench, I’m usually out finding new experiences. I travel alone on purpose, the Anthony Bourdain way: street-level, food-first, no committee, no compromises, an itinerary I build as I go. That means multi-day backpacking trips in the Eastern Sierra, hawker stands over reservations, and a standing rule that history is better confronted than skipped. The shortlist never stays short for long: Mexico, Southeast Asia, the UK and Ireland, and Eastern Europe, with Hungary, Czechia, Slovenia, and Croatia all making their case.
Back home in downtown Long Beach, the other hobbies run in parallel: Tottenham on the couch in a Son #7 shirt, LA Galaxy when the schedule lines up, K-pop shows with TWICE and BLACKPINK so far, and computer games, mostly strategy, Counter-Strike, and Rocket League. I read physical books before their adaptations, so the source material always gets to spoil the screen version first.
Rigor and wanderlust aren’t opposites. They’re one trait pointed at different problems, and both are ways of finding out what’s actually there instead of what you expected.
What It Adds Up To
Most of my work comes down to the same thing: the gap between what a model predicts and what actually happens. A simulation is confident. A test result is true. The distance between them is where I’ve spent my career. The mechanical degrees taught me how machines move, fail, and get tested. The CS degree taught me what coordinates them. Designing the hardware, instrumenting the test, and writing the software that runs it is one job, and it’s what building a drone swarm from scratch takes.
If you want to talk robotics, history, K-pop, or soccer, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.