Blog Post #1

Hey, everyone!

My name’s Jonathan Saks, and this is my blog dedicated to keeping you up-to-date on my capstone project. I’ve never had a blog before – closest I’ve had was posting to my Facebook page when I was like ten, so this will be interesting. I’m both very excited and very scared for the capstone project. Excited because I’m positive that I will learn something new, and scared because learning new things can be pretty nerve-racking.

A little bit more about me: I am currently living in Phoenix, Arizona, where we like to live in our own timezone. I would say that my passion lies with acting on film/TV – it is very possible that you’ve actually seen me in something on Netflix, but probably more likely that you haven’t – and that is something that I aim to develop into a career sometime after I graduate.

This actually leads into the origin of my CS roots: acting doesn’t pay good nor does it pay immediately. Money is important, especially if you have plans to live in a place as huge and expensive as Los Angeles and also without a ‘financial parachute’ – which I am – so I needed to make a plan. But what would be the best industry to break into that pays well and could potentially be flexible enough for me to audition/act when I need to? All of my friends back in 2017 decided to major in CS, and in that time away from school all I would hear is how, “Jon, you should go back to school in CS. The payoff is 100% worth it”. And spending roughly three months looking into it, and seeing the pandemic as the perfect opportunity to go back to school, I was convinced. Now I’m on track to finish all my classes by Fall 2025 and I couldn’t be more anxious to be done.

I have greatly appreciated my time studying at OSU and the flexibility of being able to study fully online from outside of Oregon. Truly, it has enabled me with the skills I need to break into the world of tech and I am extremely grateful. I’ve learned how to be proficient in C++, JavaScript, and Python; how to work as part of a team; and overall feel like I am capable of obtaining a job that isn’t just in food/service (absolutely nothing against those jobs, but it’s just not for me). 

Now, of the projects I have seen for the capstone, I’m not sure I have a lot of favorites. There are a few that have piqued my interest for sure, but I don’t know that they are “favorites” of mine. The Escape Room as well as the other game related projects looked pretty fun, but I felt like I was consistently having to ask myself if they would be good to have on my resume if I’m not looking to apply for game related roles? Additionally, I wasn’t totally sure if I wanted something easier that I could try and master, or something a bit more difficult that I could learn for the first time. There were a few that I passed on altogether because I felt they would have been far too difficult for me to maneuver through to completion. I found that there were two that really interested me; one had to do with testing malware – I just think being able to throw things at malware and see what happens could be fun; the other was the research project for website security – I remember having fun with whitebox/blackbox testing and just trying to figure out how to crack specific credit card combinations for a class and how much fun that was. We’ll see how it all goes, but I’m sure at the very least by the end I’ll come out having learned something extremely beneficial in the ways of software engineering.