Hey everyone! I’m Andrew Sullivan, and I wanted to start off by sharing a little about myself and my journey over recent years. I am 37 years old, I live in Keizer, Oregon with my wife Adrianne, our 15 year old daughter Katelyn, and our 9 year old son Elijah. We have two cats and two dogs. Spaztastic and Calypso are our kitties, Spaz is your typical ginger, full of spunk but always wanting cuddles. Calypso is a tortoise shell, she’s the newest member of the household. She was a barn kitten and we gave her a home this past Christmas. Shadow is our old lady Pitt/Lab mix. Unfortunately she has really bad skin allergies so is constantly medicated. More recently, though, she’s been full of energy and running around and playing a lot more. Moose is a Pitt/Australian Shepherd/Springer Spaniel mix. He’s a handful and overflowing with energy. He is constantly worried that he’s being left out of any events occurring within a visual radius. In my leisure time, my family likes to go camping and to the beach, occasionally hiking. We haven’t had much opportunity this last year to go out and do anything, so next summer we’re hoping to fix that, and maybe make up for lost time. I’m a pretty avid pool player. I’ve been a member of my local APA League for about 13 years now. I have a pool table in my garage, it doesn’t see the amount of practice that it used to, but it does still get used. It’s also about the only thing that helped me maintain my sanity during the Covid times. Over the past few months, I’ve also been getting back into gaming, and have been playing a game called Warframe. It’s been fun.
I initially got into computers back in high school with my friends. The school started a new programming class and we jumped at it and really got into it. We learned Turbo C++. It was both challenging and fun. I really enjoyed the process of making a project go from being just lines of code to a finished product that performed functions or even simply entertained people. Once out of high school, I went into construction and traveled around. I was a tutor as part of a program to help under educated adults attain their GED. I was a telemarketer. I was a mortgage servicer/debt collector. I was a commercial dishwasher repairman. And now I’m currently a software technician for a dental software company. I suppose I’ve been a bit of a jack of all trades over the years, and in more recent times I’ve redirected myself back towards where I started.
I completed my Cybersecurity Degree at Chemeketa Community College in Spring 2022, took the Summer off for a quick breather, and then I’ve been attending Oregon State University since that Fall with no breaks. It’s been challenging and intense, but interesting and fun as well. I’ve learned a lot, both about myself, and about other things that I thought I already knew about. I’m beginning my extended senior year this term, and really looking forward to this longer stretch to bring home that golden Bachelor’s Degree. I started working full-time at the beginning of the year at Open Dental Software. They’re an open source software company that provides dental management software and support. Towards the end of this capstone project, my goal is to reapply for their engineering internship position. I’ll probably be there for six months to a year, and then transition full-time into their engineering department. I’ve already spoken with them at length about my goals and they are looking forward to the customer facing experience I bring to the table, as most of their engineers don’t actually interact with the users at all, or use the software extensively the way that we do as technicians. The company uses its own software to manage their company as well, showing their faith in the product, which I really enjoy. This is the first company that I’ve worked for that treats its employees like an actual family, they promote the best work/home balance that they can, and they do things for their employees constantly. They’re incredibly supportive and encouraging. I could see myself retiring with this company 20 years down the road, maybe more.
I don’t really have a favorite technology, I’ve dabbled with several different languages. More recently I’ve used Python in several projects, but also worked with TypeScript a bit, node.js, MongoDB, Java, C++, and a couple others I can’t quite remember off the top of my head. If I could get some hands on experience with C#, that would be really nice, as it’s my understanding that C# is the predominant language used in our engineering department at work. Getting a little bit of a leg up by having a better understanding of how C# works would be beneficial.
The top 5 projects I looked at were:
1) Dating app for animal adoption. I really enjoy animals, more than I enjoy most people to be honest. I’ve done some work on a similar type of project, but not quite as in depth, and I would be interested in applying what I’ve learned and building on it. Being able to do so over the course of the capstone project and creating an actual finished project (Hopefully) would be really cool.
2) Crowd-sourced Travel Planner. I really like the idea behind this. Everyone wants to find places to go for vacations, and sometimes it’s just so hard finding all of the information and sorting through it. Being able to utilize a better source of referencing, which could be filtered based on numerous criteria, would really allow more opportunity for people to expand on their options. I think it would be really cool to be part of something like that.
3) Foodable. This one really caught my eye, mainly because in the past couple of years, I’ve really tried to pay more attention to my health and take better care of myself. It is really difficult to find healthy, local, fresh, affordable foods. The world is just so expensive now, and I think it would be really awesome to be part of a project that tries to help other people help themselves. Not to mention it’s a product I could see myself benefitting from as well.
4) Gamification of PharmD classes. I was really intrigued by this idea as I was a tutor for a couple of years, and I actually helped developed an entire hyperlink program from the ground up to help people learn and study pointed topics. I see this as somewhat similar, and it could also be really fun. I do realize this was not on the final list of projects to choose from, but it was on the initial projects list under the filter.
5) UX/UI Collaborative. My company is currently making a pretty big push in hiring engineers, as they want to focus more on the UX/UI portion of the software. I saw this project as an opportunity to dip my hand a little more in the complexities surrounding UX/UI as I don’t have the most experience with it. I realize as well that this project was not on the final list of our options, but was on the initial projects list under the filter.
I did have 3 other ones that I was interested in, but I don’t remember them at this moment, and for some reason, in all my wisdom, I neglected to write them down when I added them to my survey. At the end of the day, no matter what project I end up on, I’m excited and driven. I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone and watch as our projects begin to grow. Have a great evening everyone!
Andrew