Hello, world! This’ll be my first post, per the CS467 guidelines. As advised, I’ll talk a bit about my background, how I got into computer science and the OSU post-bacc program, and finally what I plan to do in this course.
A brief summary of the last…oh, 10 or so years…
I completed the pre-med curriculum during my undergrad, which I completed in 2011. Like the majority of pre-med freshmen at my college, I did not actually go on to med school, and I started looking at other paths around junior year. Pre-law held my attention for a while, but I ultimately graduated with a not-so-useful history degree, zero desire to attend law school, and uncertainty about what I should do next.
Partially by happenstance, I got into freelance writing. I learned to market myself, did a few cheap and pro-bono projects to build a portfolio, and eventually got a solid gig going as a business-to-business copywriter. I spent about six years working with various clients and marketing firms writing white papers, case studies, and other somewhat dry but well-paying materials.
Knowing I didn’t want to write marketing materials for the rest of my working life, I took a brief foray back into healthcare. I completed a couple of pre-requisites and got accepted into the University of Kansas Medical Center’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program, which began in 2016. Academically, it went great! After a couple of clinicals, however, I realized that in no way, shape, or form did I want to spend eight hours per day on patient care for the rest of my working life, either. Most clinics are also a mess in terms of sheer patient volume and burnout, but that’s another story.
During that year at PT school I also met my now-wife through our shared passion – strength training. We both competed at a high level in powerlifting at the time, and she is a physical therapist. She moved in with me briefly while I was still at KU, but once I wasn’t tied down by school any longer, we moved to Northern Colorado, where she had been living previously, and where her parents have lived for the last 14 years. We’re coming up on our fifth wedding anniversary, November 4th 🙂
At the same time, I spoke with my now-brother-in-law and a few other software developers I know about the industry, and they universally agreed it’d be a much better fit for my personality and interests – introverted, engineering-minded, fairly tech-savvy, and skilled (maybe obsessed) with solving technical problems. I originally planned to enroll in a computer science program at the University of Kansas City, Missouri, but with our move to Colorado, OSU’s online program made a lot more sense!
I knew from the get-go that I’d made the right choice, and I actually got my first developer job about a third of the way through the program in Summer 2018. That job was for CACI, a defense contractor with an office in Fort Collins, CO. It was a purely GIS (geographic information systems job), where I worked on various utilities that basically allowed the office’s GIS technicians to do their work faster and with fewer errors.
That was a contract gig, and unfortunately the company decided to lay off all contract R&D personnel a few months later in January 2019 – which included my position. My wife had concurrently just decided to leave her clinic job to start her own online physical therapy and coaching business, and about a week after my layoff a still-undiagnosed autoimmune condition couched her for the next three months…quite a tumultuous time for us 🙂
Fortunately I was able to secure a new position at a company called New Century Software that April. NCS was also pure GIS work: C# desktop application development for oil and gas pipeline management. To make a long story short, that job provided a great working environment and skills development but terrible pay, and by February 2021 I moved on to similar but better-paying work at Schneider Electric. That was more GIS desktop app work, this time for electric and gas utilities.
The work at Schneider turned out to be a lot more customer support than actual development, however, and I knew better opportunities were out there. I started working as a contractor for Microsoft in March 2022, and just a few weeks later my wife and I moved to our new home in Anna, TX (small town in the DFW area).
There was some chicanery with the contracting arrangement that prompted me to start looking for other opportunities just a few months later, which I’m glad I did. I secured my current position with Amazon at exactly the right time. Just a couple of weeks after leaving Microsoft, I received a text from a former coworker and fellow contractor saying that Microsoft had cut ties with that contracting agency entirely, leaving quite a few people without work.
It’s all turned out for the best, though. I’m working with a great team at Amazon, and I can tell this is likely to be a long-time gig – perhaps the last company I’ll work for before getting into a position where I can be completely self-sustained with other business ventures – also another story. I’m working on a team that handles the company’s benefits administration and signups, which for a company Amazon’s size is apparently quite a large endeavor. The backend work is all in Java – which is new to me – and the infrastructural and frontend work is in Typescript and various other flavors of Javascript.
The Capstone Project
So that all brings us to now…I’m just shy of (finally) completing this program because a couple of employers along the way have offered tuition reimbursement after a year of tenure. So, I’ve postponed classes twice now, and when I have enrolled it’s been at a slower pace than when I started. With four year of industry experience, I’m not sure whether future employers are going to care about the completion of the degree (Amazon did not) – but I want to see it through, having gotten this far. Plus, I’m hoping my project might actually be the beginning of a useful and even lucrative application.
The application itself I am tentatively titling “PR Tracker.” A brief background here – My wife and I have transitioned from competitive powerlifting to competitive bodybuilding (she actually turned pro last year and just completed her pro debut), and we’ve gone into business with our coach to produce written and video content – some available publicly, some placed behind a paywall on our website. This application may be of use to our viewers and customers, and even if it’s not, it’ll certainly be useful to us!
In strength training, people generally refer to their personal best lifts as “PRs” (personal records). There are a few programs available for recording these best performances, but they tend to include a whole lot of fluff that your typical bodybuilder or strength athlete doesn’t really care about. Their UIs are likewise geared towards endurance athletes.
What I want to write is a simpler, smoother, more streamlined mobile app with our needs in mind: a program that simply records weight x repetitions for any exercise and stores those records in a database for later retrieval. The UI will allow filtering by exercise, date, and a few other key metrics. Those records will also be linked to videos (stored locally at first, perhaps in the cloud eventually).
A basic use case is the following: A lifter is in the gym squatting. They’re going to work up to a (hopefully) best all-time set of 10 reps. They can use PR tracker to see what their current 10-rep best is, along with any number of past performances. They can also quickly pull up videos of those past performances to get a more qualitative idea of what’s really going to constitute progress. It’s one thing to see, on “paper” that you did 315 x 10 one workout and 325 x 10 the next, but a video offers a more complete picture…was depth consistent? Was rep quality comparable or better on the heavier set? Long-term progress requires both qualitative and quantitative analysis, and the video-linking functionality will help keep users honest.
During this quarter, I’m hoping to achieve at least a minimum viable product: a somewhat Instagram- or Pinterest-esque video collection UI that offers displays thumbnail images of the videos of recent performances, all filterable based on the aforementioned metrics. Users will be able to create new records, edit existing data, and use media captured either in-app or with their phones’ camera applications.
I’m looking forward to getting started!
