Moving to the Desert

June 2018

I'm leaving Bowling Green and all of Ohio behind to fulfill a dream of moving west. I had never been further west than Indiana until Summer 2017 when I got to experience the incredible beauty and adventure of Arizona. After traveling around the state for a week my girlfriend and I were hooked, and the idea of moving here began brewing in our heads. As we approached graduation we furvently applied to jobs in Arizona and luckily Amanda landed the job of her dreams. We packed up our cars and got rid of everything else, and voyaged 2,000 miles west to our new home of Avondale, AZ.

 GRADUATION 

May 2018

My days at Bowling Green State University finally came to a screeching halt, as I crammed the remaining classes in my program into the Spring 2018 semester and raced toward the finish line. I began life at BGSU in 2013 as a High School English Education Major, and after a year of learning about child psychology and observing high school classes I realized I absolutely did not like teaching. It took very little time for me to connect my love of computers and technology with my passive interest in software, and I quickly switched majors to CS. I spent the next 4 years catching up on Math classes and adding as many extracuricular CS classes I could fit, like Windows App Development and Web Development. The latter immediately sparked my interest and I began focusing all of my class projects on web development. I even built a binary signal converter using html tables to produce graph lines. Now that I've graduated I'm going to miss the small town I've called home for 5 years, but I'm excited to propel my life forward into the next dimension.

Senior Software Project

May of 2018

The Senior Software Project was a semester long class dedicated to learning the sotware development cycle in a hands-on way. The class was divided into teams of 3-7 and assigned real-world clients who needed different software applications built. Our client was the CS Internship coordinator at our university, and he wanted a central web-based hub to handle the CS Internship application process. The software neeeded to handle the process of students applying for an internship and the coordinator approving/denying the application. It also needed to handle file uploads, user-types, and administative access.

This class allowed me to experience and implement the Agile Development Method first-hand; creating user stories and dividing them into iterations with milestones, and utilizing Git version control to push features to production. The main struggle we faced with this project was learning a new framework while simultaneously working on the project. The application was built with the Laravel MVC framework, and none of my team had any experience with an MVC framework. It was difficult to set it up on our personal machines and coordinate the features and their files, but we ultimately began running smoothely after the first 2 iterations. Our software didn't end up needing to be very complex – basically a front-end database portal with user-types and file handling, but the main takeaway from this class was direct exposure to the software development cycle.

Co-op at PropertyPresWizard, LLC.

December 2017

This project was the greatest achievement of my career in programming to date. I was able to land a co-op position at my #1 choice of company, PropertyPresWizard. This co-op helped me evolve from CS student to professional web developer. PPW was my #1 choice because I knew there was a lot I could learn from their close-knit team of developers, and I was not disappointed.

I worked on a 'News Feed' software feature for the duration of my co-op. The company needed a way to handle communication within their web application and I was responsible for the whole project. I designed the News Feed to allow users to create posts like on social networks, within their organization. PPW clients are often teams or entire companies, and the News Feed would provide them a place to discuss work-related issues, right inside the software. It also allowed our company, PPW, to post news of software updates and other administrative details directly to their clients.

I faced a variety of issues over the 17-week co-op. I not only had to build the feature from the ground up, but also integrate it with their existing enterprise software. I had to learn their database and AWS storage systems and get used to their custom version of jQuery. I managed to pull it off with some outstanding help from their talented team of developers.

Barber Lounge Toledo

November 2017

I was hired to redesign an outdated site for a high-end barbershop. The client wanted a modern design and integration with the MindBody Appointment App. This was my biggest project to date and required a lot of time working with the client to nail down the design they envisioned.

With this project the main struggle I faced was bringing the clients' vision to life. They wanted a cross between their own design scheme and that of the MindBody App, and wanted it to all look similar to another barbershop site they found. In the end I believe the site was a success, and is now my most impressive design to date.

Nate Kester - Saxophonist

July 2017

I built this site for a musician client who was promoting his debut album, "The Nate Kester Group". He also wanted a platform to advertise upcoming shows. I set up an administration subdomain that enables him to add upcoming tour dates as he books them.

The main struggle I faced with this project was setting up a system to sell sheet music PDFs directly from the site. After exploring his options as far as managing document sales and payment processes I determined there was no real solution that would allow him to make a profit, as commerce hosting services require monthly payment plans that he couldn't afford. We compromised with a simple message directing visitors interested in purchasing sheet music to contact the client directly. To support this I added a contact form that automatically emails the client any messages submitted on the site.

Arizona Road Trip

May of 2017

At the beginning of Summer 2017, my girlfriend Amanda, her dad and sister and I took a week-long road trip around Arizona. I'd never been further west than Indiana before and the area proved to be incredible. Beautiful landscapes in every direction, warm sunny weather, and the influence of southwestern culture in the buildings and art. Amanda and I liked the state so much that we eventually decided to move there.

McCoy Insurance Agency, Inc

March of 2017

This site I built for an insurance agency was the first professional development job I've completed, before even finishing my own personal portfolio site. The previous semester I had completed Intro to Web Development at BGSU which really sparked my interest in the focus, especially the Design aspect. In that class I learned Bootstrap 3 which I used to build this site. I learned to position elements in the webpage to be balanced and aesthetically pleasing. I struggled in connecting to the FTP server that was hosting the company's previous site but eventually learned the system and successfully uploaded the new build.

Europe

Summer of 2016

Around the end of 2015 my girlfriend Amanda and I made a life changing decision by signing up for a 4 week Art & Architecture tour of London, Barcelona, Florence and Rome, lasting from mid May - mid June of 2016. That became one of the most important months of our lives, as we had magnificent experiences with a group of 15 new friends.

Some highlights of the trip include Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, Michaelangelo's Pietà in the Vatican, Rome, and the local nightlife across London and Florence