CadToCode

Hello everyone welcome back to my continuing escapades of my last quarter at OSU and first few month as a software engineer!

RailsConf is next week and while I am excited to spend time with my new teammates and stay in a nice hotel room and dine out for a week on the company tab, I have a feeling it’s going to be incredibly overwhelming. Many of the events at the conference will be hands-on workshops and I have a feeling I will being a little out of my element. I’m crossing my fingers for some beginner friendly events and a welcoming community (which may be a tall order in this, in my opinion, heavily over-gate-kept industry. But I am optimistic!) I will definitely report back. If anyone is reading this and has been to the conference in the past I would be curious about your experience.

In capstone project news, I’ve been diving a lot deeper into Firebase lately for some project features. NoSQL originally seemed a little weird and sloppy to me but now that I’ve used it a bit more, I cant imagine using anything else for a personal and small projects. It’s just so easy, especially with flutter/dart. Nested arbitrary JSON objects really are a great way to store data. I wish that I would have looked into a bit more before starting the capstone project and then we wouldn’t have needed our PostgreSQL API backend at all. That said, it’s a bit scary. I am very curious about what is actually going on under the hood. The amount of work that went into making it a usable as it is is incredible. SQL is still king in the industry and I wouldn’t be surprised if there ultimately was a traditional database somewhere in the many layers of abstraction that support Firebase. Everyday that I learn something new in this field/industry I am blown away by the complexity and with what experience devs are able to abstract away and still keep performant. It is exciting and hopefully I can someday contribute to some similar cutting edge project.

Anyway, my next post will be live and direct from RailsConf so stay cool until then.

Well, it’s May 5th so you know what that means; It’s time to break out the margaritas get LOCO. But not me, alas, because I, like many of you, have a certain project that I need to be working on. But that’s fine because I can almost already smell the paper that my new diploma will be printed on. The project midpoint is here and what was originally a vague and seemingly insurmountable task has now taken its primordial form and I think we’re actually going to pull this project off. Fantastic. The app is starting to actually function and I think we might even have the main functionality completed by the end of this weekend. Funnily enough, we haven’t even named the app yet so we’ll have to get around to that. The trend these days seems to be to apply the ‘ly’ of ‘ify’ suffix to the end of some related word (see Grammarly, Shopify, etc…) I personally think the trend is a little lame but I’m sure some marketing team out there has made a killing. We’ll probably go with something like that.

In other news, I mentioned in an earlier post that I will be attending RailsConf as part of my new job but now looks like I will be attending another industry event as well. Looks like I’ll be going to DEFCON this year in August in fabulous Las Vegas Nevada. What was originally planned as a one day visit to the convention with my programmer friends before I was employed is now going to be another awesome event that I can have at least a somewhat valid reason for attending! My new company is a cyber security company and it looks like they might even be paying for some of it (winning). That said, I’ll still probably be one of the dumbest people in the room and I’ll have to make sure to completely turn off all of electronics on the show floor lest I risk getting my identification info hacked and plastered on the famous DEFCON wall of shame. Super excited.

Another week and another set of new experiences for me. Friday will mark my first whole month as an official professional software developer. I still have no clue what’s going on, but I think I am making progress. I understand what they mean by imposter syndrome now. It blows my mind that I’ve been studying CS since 2019 and this degree seems really is just the the bare minimum to start drinking from the fire hose of new information and expectations that is professional tech world. That said, I’m lucky enough to have a small and supportive team, though, and they seem happy to have me which is great – since I feel like more of burden than anything else at the moment. I suppose they all went through the same thing, which is encouraging.

In other news, the capstone project goes well. I think we’ve made great progress towards the midpoint benchmark and I think we will end up having a simple albeit robust app that could potentially be expanded in the future. Through the project I’ve learned a lot about more about flutter, dart, and full stack development. I can’t wait to graduate and get my nights and weekends back so I might be able to start pursuing some personal projects. The end of the quarter and my time at OSU is only 5 weeks away! Keep it real out there.

Hello everyone! It has been a busy and exciting week for me for a couple of reasons.

First, my capstone project group wrote and pushed our first commits to our group repo. I managed to get the basic front end flutter structure of the app set up and then incorporated some of my teammates widgets/screens. We now have something actually tangible to show and I’m starting to feel very optimistic about the project. Although, I didn’t get as much code written as I’d like, it was an excellent review week for flutter. I also spent some time reading documentation and learning about the flask micro architecture (which I have no experience with), which I felt was very constructive. I still haven’t managed to get my local server up and running yet but one of my teammates working on the back end was nice enough to create a little guide for how they set it up. Thanks, Marodin!

Secondly: status of the new job. Great so far. I’m so glad I don’t work in manufacturing anymore. People are not only happier but smarter and more helpful in this industry. For awhile I wasn’t sure if I was making the right choice by pursuing this program and trying to change careers, but now I’m really feeling like it was probably one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Apparently I’m doing pretty well too (although that’s not really for me to decide). I’ve already made my first pull requests to some of the company repositories and I’m starting to get a good feel for the whole Ruby/Rails framework. In fact, I even got invited to go to RailsConf with the rest of the team in Portland in May, which will be my first industry event. I’m super excited.

That’s it for me this week. Have a good one.

I missed my last post due to being super busy and overwhelmed with my new job and our capstone project plan.

So, the new job. Let’s talk about it. So far it’s awesome and way better than my last job. I’m on the development team for the company’s 3 mains apps. They are all Ruby on Rails apps (something that I’ve never had any experience with) and right now I have almost no clue what’s going on, but it feels good! My coworkers are all super cool and helpful and I think I got really lucky scoring this gig. More to come as I learn this new framework and all of the other skills that go into being a software developer!

Onto the capstone project. It was a busy weekend for us. As a team, we probably spent a good 10 hours total in our MS Teams chat hashing out the scope of our app and the team responsibilities. It was a little rough and first but I think we have a solid plan now!

Here is an overview:

Our group will be developing a crowd-sourced shopping app for our capstone project. Our goal will be to create a simple and robust app with a large potential for expansion in the future. For the scope of this class however, the final app will focus on only meeting the basic requirements set forth in the project description. The app’s primary value proposition will be to provide users with a ‘best’ recommended store based on the items on their shopping list compared to crowd-sourced data of other users that has been uploaded at surrounding stores by other users. The database of item uploads and prices is appended to, when users scan barcodes of items in store, enter their prices, apply identifying tags, and upload directly to our database. Crowd-sourced data is inherently unreliable and one of the goals of the app will be to make uploading as simple as possible and done in such a way that the amount of data, and its potential uses, can be maximized. In addition, to incentivize users to create uploads, a reputation system is implemented where users obtain new titles as they reach certain numbers of price updates. Finally, users can post comments to a live feed, providing extra shopping information like store busyness, out-of-stock items, and other helpful details.

So, looks like I got my first choice for the capstone project. I wanted to do a full-stack app so I chose the Crowd Sourced Shopping App. My team members are Ciarra M, Rayna N, and Marodin Y! I’m really looking forward to working with them!

I chose this project because it seems pretty open ended and with a broad scope, especially with regard to what languages/technologies we can use, and what kind of feature we can implement. I’m open to basically anything (but ideally stuff that will make us the most employable!).

In other news my new job starts on Monday and I’m super excited for it. Here is a link to the main website: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/

Greetings distinguished colleagues, and welcome to my CS467 Capstone Project blog! My name is Lucas and I’m coming to you live and direct from Bellingham WA and I’m very excited to be finishing up this degree with you all. The program has been a great experience overall.

I got my first degree in applied math from Western Washington University in 2012 and I’ve been working full-time in the manufacturing industry as a mechanical designer/engineer for the past 6 years (after getting some CAD certificates). I’ve been in the program since 2019 when I decided I wanted expand/shift my career into software (because I’m in my early thirties and still can’t figure out what I want to do with my life, apparently).

I’m super excited because, after months of searching and countless rejections, I recently received and accepted an offer for my first software engineering job that I will be starting April 4th. I expect the next few months for me will probably be quite wild as I work through this course and learn the ropes of my new position.

My new position is in webdev so I’m primarily looking at any of the full stack web app projects.