Andre Ballesteros’s Blog

To think there are only 3 weeks left of my time at Oregon State :(. What better way to finish and graduate than during the holidays! Thanks to the professor of 381, Eric Ianni, I was able to get ahead of the modules in the course. I only have 1 module left to complete and a lab, with almost the whole month of November to complete it. This helps me out for my capstone project because I can dedicate most of the next few weeks to finishing it up.

I was very sick last week so I fell a little behind on my part of the project for capstone. However, my teammates understood and I have made some ground and was able to contribute my part. They have been very helpful and understanding. Couldn’t have asked for a better group. I definitely lucked out, especially since I left it all to chance.

As my final blog post, I just wanted to say it’s been a blast OSU! I had my rough patches these past few years, but the time has definitely flew by. When I first started, I never in a million years thought I would be in the position that I am in now. I was able to get a “second chance” at college and actually land an internship and a job before I graduated. I am looking forward to what the years and opportunity in tech will bring me! Bye and thank you!

I am half way through my final quarter and it hasn’t hit me yet that I will be graduating in about a month! Another thing I still can’t believe is that I was able to secure a job before I graduated. I can finally call myself a SWE! I start my job in Jan. Remote work out of Seattle. This leaves me a month of “free time” in which I do plan on refreshing myself with the tech stack I used during my internship that led to the job offer.

Switching gears to my classes, I am fortunate that CS381 releases their modules a few weeks ahead. I am currently on week 8 of the modules. This helps me focus more time to working on my capstone project which is seeing an uptick in the amount of work each week. My capstone project is very Docker heavy and luckily I do have some experience working with it. However, what does take time is getting myself familiar with their codebase. At this point in time, I feel that I have an understanding of how the codebase’s individual parts work, but still need to figure out how to connect them all together.

My teammates have been great and very communicative. We have all made progress, albeit slowly, on the parts of our project (frontend/backend) that we are responsible for. On top of that, we also started to meet an extra 2 days/week (3 total) as sort of a checkup on where we are at or if any of us need help. These are all good signs in completing a project!

I’m about a quarter of the way through my final quarter at OSU and I could not be more excited. For the first three weeks, I was able to get a few weeks ahead of the modules in CS381. The class has been really interesting and informative so far. I do admit I spent a little too long on the first two labs, but apparently each successive lab gets easier.

Looking at CS467, the first few weeks have been a little slow for our team as our sponsor and lead engineer have been slowly giving us their requirements and access to their repo. We signed the NDA monday of this week and just received access to their github repo today which my team and I will familiarize ourselves with their codebase. Very exciting stuff!

My team will present our functional requirements to them tomorrow morning in which then they would be able to paint us the true picture of what they expect and/or want out of the capstone. Me and my team have been waiting to get started and excited to get to work, despite the time crunch we are under due to starting a little later.

Only issue I see there being is the due dates and requirements of Progress Report #1. The requirements ask for a video of our progress, however, with only 2-3 days between us “starting” after our meeting with the sponsors and the actual due date of the Report, the video will have minimal content. This is something I will bring up to our TA, who has been really understanding, flexible, and great with their communication.

Graduation is upon me as this is my last quarter! Currently taking 467 and 381. Looks like 381 is going to take some extra work, but the topics involved is really interesting and I can see it being really useful in my development and career in Tech.

Coming into this course, I thought I wanted to take it easy and do the minimum work for an A as I had just accepted a job offer that I start after I graduate. However, I came across a project that stuck out to me. The “Custom Scripts Containerization…” project to be exact. It is one of the sponsored projects and the application itself is meant to help those working in a research lab by creating a workflow that allows them to save and access brain activity data. If chosen for this project, I can see myself putting nothing less than my 100% effort as this project can potentially be put to use in the future. Whether or not I succeed or fail horribly, I can see this being a great challenge and learning opportunity which I’m all for.

My degree 1.0 was a BS in Biological Sciences. I worked in the lab as a biochemist in production and research for a number of years. At the tail end of that career, I was about to head off to PT school to earn my doctorate’s in physical therapy before switching to earning my degree 2.0 in Computer science so that I may enter the Tech Industry.

I am so glad I did! I’ve always been interested in computers since I was a kid whether it was building my own computers or fooling around with scripts/files, etc. before I even knew what it was I was doing. l was fortunate enough to come across this program and feel that I have made the correct decision!

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