Hello all!  Thank you for taking the time to look at my CS 467 course blog!  This will be the first post of many throughout the course, and I look forward to writing about my journey while working on the course project, as well as some of my interests related to CS, and much more!

I would like to kick things off by introducing myself.

My name is Evan Maher, and I grew up and currently live in Kansas City with my wife and our 6-year old husky.  I initially graduated from college back in 2015 with a major in Business Administration, which led me to work for 3 different companies in the span of 4 years.  When COVID hit in the beginning of 2020, I was furloughed (like many others) from my job, and eventually laid off permanently.  As many of us did, I had a lot of spare time on my hands to re-evaluate my life and whether or not my current career actually made me happy (or if I felt rewarded from it).  The short answer to that was no.  This led me to brainstorm what I really wanted in a career, and what type of work would make me feel rewarded.

I have always loved computers, from a very young age, PC gaming with friends on games such as RuneScape and Warcraft 3 (sorry for the nerd moment there, folks), emailing my grandparents from AOL back in the good old days of dial-up Internet, and much more.  Eventually, graduating to more modern games and PC technologies, and providing tech support to nearly all of my family members.  Even while working in the business world, I spent most of my free time (that wasn’t taken up by my wife or dog!) PC gaming with friends and talking over Discord, even just to catch up on “life stuff.”  I have also personally built two different PC’s since I graduated from college, and helped friends and family build some of theirs as well.  I ended up deciding that what makes me truly happy is working with computers, whether on the hardware or software side of things, I just love it.

Eventually, this led me to choose Computer Science as my career path, and the Oregon State Post-Bacc program to get me there.  My second blog post will touch on my experience so far in the program, and some things that I am looking forward to in CS 467.

Thank you for your time and interest, and I look forward to sharing with you again very soon!