Zachary Maes
In three weeks I will receive my second bachelor’s degree…
In three months I will start my job as a cybersecurity analyst at Visa…
Two years ago I started my first course at OSU…
Three years ago I got married to the love of my life…
Seven years ago I graduated from FSU and began teaching…
Ten years ago I climbed Mt. Whitney to watch the sunrise and took this photo…
I turned 30 a few days ago and It has left me feeling reflective on what I have accomplished over the years. As I was searching for a photo to include in this blog post, I came across the album from when went backpacking 70 miles in the Sierra Nevada. It was the summer after my freshman year at Florida State University, and my old eagle scout buddies and I planned a trip which would end in the summiting of Mt. Whitney, the largest peak in the contiguous United States. Our plan was to pack all of our food and gear and hike from Sequoia National Park to the base of Mt. Whitney in 7 days. We would purify our water whenever we could find It along the trail. Then we would take a rest day at the base camp before our final challenge. At 14,496 ft in elevation, completely exposed to the elements, 2 miles to summit and 12 miles to descend, climbing Mt. Whitney would be the greatest challenge of my life up to that point.
I prepared for months prior to the journey. Nightly map planning skype calls with the boys. Daily hikes in Tom Brown Park with my 50 lb Osprey backpack. Scrambled eggs every morning, Ramen noodles and chicken every night. Not to mention navigating summer dorm life because I almost flunked out of school during the Spring semester. It was a season of pure, intentional focus, and when August rolled around I was physically fit, earned all As, and ready to get lost in the California wilderness.
In many ways, my pivot into tech these last three years has been a challenge similar to that of my journey through the mountains a decade ago. I have learned so much about the technology and myself during this time, and it has culminated in this final semester where I have had multiple projects. As a TA I am close to releasing a github react guide for future students. In Software Engineering 1, I am on my final sprint to complete a new mobile app that I plan to place on the app store. And finally in Capstone I am about to finish up my final tasks and assignments for the 911 dashboard with my team and our company sponsor. While I have learned so much in all my prior terms, this term has really put my skills to the test. I mention all three of my projects because I have really had to pull from all of my prior learnings to accomplish everything. Planning and organizing a project is hard. Doing so with a team of six and a monsterous code base is even harder. I have learned invaluable lessons during this term.
Before I talk about my biggest successes during this course, I think it is important to mention some of the struggles and failures also. I found another parallel to my summit journey a decade ago in this topic. The picture above is the only picture I took of my 14 thousand foot sunrise. It’s a terrible picture. Both the foreground and background are extremely blurry and the sun is completely distorted. I have an excuse as to why this picture turned out so poorly, it was about zero degrees on the summit and I didn’t have the proper cold weather clothing. But, that’s just an excuse. I have to live with the fact that I almost fell down the mountain and died multiple times from slipping on ice in the dark, to only come out with this embarrassing picture of the sunrise. Similarly, I have also struggled and failed on some tasks during this term. Mainly, I have suffered from procrastination and disorganization. I have not closed google chrome in about two months and have 30 tabs open with partially finished research or tasks. It’s like when you have a dirty apartment but you know exactly where everything is located. Also, early on in the capstone project I had to travel out of town for a week to visit family. It was very difficult the following week to catch up with the tremendous amount of work that my group had completed. Prior to leaving I was ahead and had just set up the initiated project repo. Upon returning I had to catch up on recorded meetings, 20 react components, and updates to the backend api. It was rough, but thankfully I am very communicative and informed my group about my progress both prior to my trip and afterwards. I did eventually catch up and was able to make more contributions and provide some value though. I’m thankful that everyone in my group has each other’s backs and that we really connected as a team throughout this process.
Teamwork really does make the dream work. I think one of my biggest successes in this course as I mentioned above was my ability to communicate with my team and be flexible when certain situations arose. Above is one of the more humorous photos from my backpacking trip. Isaac “fell” off the mountain and it took the whole team to “pull him back up to safety”. All jokes aside, I think this part of my trip beautifully encompasses my capstone team. Everyone had great communication and picked up the slack where it was needed. Our meetings were always positive, and it was always so cool to see the reactions of our sponsors when we would show them our updates. I think we are all very proud of the product that we developed, and It was an amazing learning experience. To get into the technical side of things, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about docker-compose, C#/.NET, and Tailwind css. It was difficult to learn a new language with C# but I feel so much more confident in my development skills now. Prior to this course I had never touched Tailwind css, but now I can style a responsive webpage with relative ease. This mattered because our application had lots of functionality, but was not very usable in smaller screen sizes. Our sponsor’s mockup designs were all geared towards a tablet style UI and we originally designed for a large desktop UI. I was able to add multiple breakpoints and flexbox to many components to make them responsive to varying screens sizes. It’s a far cry from three years ago where I struggled to add a style tag to html on codecademy. I still have a lot to learn, but I now have an amazing base of knowledge to launch off of!
As I’ve written about here, in many ways my journey through this program has paralleled by past experience. I can only imagine that life will continue to happen to me in the future and I will find more ways to connect the dots between the present and the past. These last 10 years have been a wild roller coaster and I’m sure the next 10 will be equally awesome and challenging. Soon I will have earned my degree and proven to myself that I can accomplish whatever I put my mind to. I’ll stash my degree away somewhere just like this picture above, but I will pull it out every so often and be reminded of my journey.
