Author: Joshua Jansen

Heyo,

This term has gone by relatively fast. Luckily for me my team decided that we wanted to knock out the rest of the term so we could have more flexibility in spending time with our families for Thanksgiving and the coming holidays. So, at this point this post is the last thing I need to do for the term!

The project thus far has been coming along nicely. We built our tech stack up and have a great git repository going, as well as a standardized plan on how things should be done. I also got to spend some time working on scraping with Scrapy which was an interesting learning experience. It wasn’t too hard to learn, but it was a bit confusing until I learned about the Scrapy shell which made things ALOT easier for debugging what was being scrapped. I unfortunately missed a pretty big bug in how the inner was decided simply because in MMA, there are 3 outcomes; a winner, a draw, or a no continue. I had to spend one night staying up a bit late patching it so one of my teammates could finish up the progress report before Thanksgiving. Luckily I got it fixed and everything went smoothly from there.

I have really enjoyed the course thus far because it has provided a relative close real world example of what being a coder is like (I think anyways). Having to do extensive research before even getting to code and having to deal with various needs and wants from my teammates has been a different experience and pace from other classes thus far in the course. I cant wait to see what our team builds in the coming months.

Interestingly I have decided, at the moment, not to purse a job in tech industry. I have applied and made it through the final set of interviews for a job as a full time career firefighter. I will know whether I got one of the 2 available jobs come Monday or Tuesday. Ranking in the top 5 as well as ranking number 2 has been a great confidence boost, as well as has given me experience in interviewing that I had lacked up until this point in my life. Regardless of the outcome, if I get picked or not from among the top 5, I’m happy with where I got.

Have a great rest of the year and happy holidays to whomever reads this! Bye.

Hello,

It has been awhile since my last post. Since then a lot has happened! I was invited to join a project on building a prediction model for Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). The group consists of 4 of us, those being James, Colin, Vili, and of course myself. So far the development processes has consisted of entirely of research and documentation. We all have invested a lot of time in determining how exactly we are going to both build a algorithm as well as store the vast amount of data for the algorithm to process. This initial process is crucial for the coming terms as it lays the foundation for us to be able to build a functional program.

Even though we are in the documentation stage we have hit some roadblocks. Initially we had our weekly meeting set to be on Thursday. however, since all the assignments are due on Thursday, this left us with very little time in order to get any problems corrected before the submissions deadline; which was only a few hours after the meeting ended! We decided that Mondays were best to have our weekly meetings and that we should probably continue to meetings on Thursday but instead they would be for the assignments due next week; not the ones due that night!

One exciting development with the project is the potential to implement machine learning. One of our team members, Vili, is very informed and has a lot of experience with machine learning (more then the rest of us anyways). Although it is a stretch goal we hope to be able to implement machine learning in some way to help bolster our prediction models accuracy rating.

During all this I have continued to work on my other 3 classes that I have going on at the same time. I have also been working full time as a part time employee (full time hours but not a full time employee) at my local fire department. Some interesting developments within the department was the opening of two career positions. I have applied for them and may have an interview within the next two weeks for the spots! Hopefully, Iam able to get on, otherwise I will probably be hunting for a job that actually involves using my Computer Science degree!

Here’s hoping for the best. Until next time have a great day!

Hi!

My name is Josh, and I currently live in Oak Harbor, Washington. Oak Harbor is a decently sized city located on Whidbey Island, which falls into the Pacific Standard Time Zone (PST). During my free time, I mostly enjoy playing video games. I started with action shooters such as Halo and Call of Duty when I was younger. As time has gone on, I found that I enjoy games with more meaningful goals and gameplay loops instead of a meaningless level-up rank. Survival games ultimately won me over, especially those that incorporate strategy, such as games like Don’t Starve Together, Terraria, Stardew Valley, and RimWorld to name a few. My earliest and all-time favorite game, however, is RuneScape. Other hobbies I enjoy include Magic: The Gathering, lifting weights, watching movies, and going on hikes with my wife and dogs.

Video games are the original reason I got into computers. I would constantly try to modify game files and run mods on various games. I attempted to write scripts to automate tasks in games to make my playtime more efficient (I admit to blatant cheating, I know). I never delved deeply into software programming when I was younger, but this early exposure is the main reason I wanted to go to school to learn programming.

Although I love video games, my time at OSU has not been focused on game development. I have instead geared my degree more toward Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by earning a minor in psychology and taking psychology classes related to Computer Science.

Interestingly enough, my current job and work experience have nothing to do with computer science. I currently work as a part-time firefighter in my hometown and was previously a combat medic in the Army. I am trying to get hired full-time as a career firefighter within the next two months, and if I do, my computer science degree may not see much use after I earn it.

That being said, there are a couple of projects that really interest me, specifically game design projects, as I would love to gain experience building some sort of game. These include from the project portal:

1. HTML 5 Tower Defense Game

2. Online Trading Card Game Maker

3. Text Adventure Game for Education

4. Build an Emulator and Run Space Invaders ROM

Thanks for reading this far, and have a great day!