Hello! My name is Cody Ray. I currently live in Bend, Oregon (PST/PDT). Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of hiking and fly fishing. When the weather turns, I enjoy reading fiction and playing guitar.
I became interested in software in my early 20s. Before that, I worked as a welder, building trailers. That experience sparked my interest in becoming an engineer, so I enrolled in a few community college courses on a Mechanical Engineering track. One of those courses was Intro to Engineering Computing, which taught MATLAB. This was my first exposure to programming, and I found it so interesting that I switched my major to Computer Science by the end of the term.
After that school year, I had the opportunity to take a summer internship in the software engineering department at a company called 6 Degrees Health. Following the internship, I transferred to Oregon State University and moved to Corvallis to live just off campus. I had a great time and learned a lot while taking classes on campus, but unfortunately, the world went into lockdown for COVID in the middle of the spring term, forcing me to pivot. For various pandemic-related reasons, I went to work full-time for 6 Degrees Health, the company I had interned with. I completed a few courses sporadically over the next few years through e-campus but had to focus mainly on my job, and it looked like it would take me quite a while to graduate. Gradually, circumstances improved, and a few months ago I realized I was in as good a position as I would ever be to return to school, so I decided to focus on my degree full-time.
Healthcare billing is an interesting field with many challenging problems, but I am excited to get my degree so I can branch out into other areas. I am particularly interested in security and hope to eventually move into that industry.
I have been working for a startup called My Price Health for a little over a year now. My boss has been kind enough to allow me to continue working reduced hours while I complete my degree. In my job, I work on tools and systems for managing healthcare claims and eligibility data. I feel fortunate to do most of my work with Go and PostgreSQL, as I find both enjoyable to work with. I sometimes use Python or shell scripts for quick, ad-hoc tasks. Last winter, I switched my editor from Visual Studio Code to Emacs and have since developed an affinity for Emacs Lisp, which I now use whenever I can justify it.
There are many interesting projects for this course. Because of my interest in security, I am most drawn to the Website Security Research and Malware Analysis projects. Both sound like fantastic ways to gain valuable real-world experience in the field. The Website Security Research project, in particular, seems like it would be very practical. Having been involved in web development for a few years but knowing little about properly securing a website, it would be an excellent experience to build one specifically for researching vulnerabilities.