Midnight Shopping

I’ve been playing with computers for as long as I can remember, starting with a cast-off Macintosh in my dad’s office. Way too much of that time was spent on videogames, and that led to me looking into mods and making my own when I was a teen. That led to my first pass at computer science; unfortunately I was a classic ‘gifted’ case and fell pretty hard on my face when reaching college level classes. I switched over to food science and got my act together to actually graduate.

I ended up landing in brewing, which turns out to be much like the videogame industry: long hours, hard work, and pay below scale for the skill set. I stuck with it because I did enjoy it and was in a pretty special position. I was the only distiller for a mid-size brewery that had plans to expand the distillery into a full department, placing me in management once that happened. Once my wife and I started planning for children, I gave up on that promotion ever happening and got started on this program.

I’m not entirely sure what I want to do beyond ‘work’ once I graduate. I’ve specialized into app development with Mobile, Networks, and Cloud as my electives as I have some personal project ideas and they are conducive to making a strong public-facing portfolio I hope will help in my job hunt. However, I have a soft spot for VR and my ‘white whale’ that is far beyond anything I think I can ever manage is something akin to a virtual historical village smashed together with Wikipedia; being able to examine details in a scene and pull up deeper information or roll time forward and back to see changes through history.

My team chose the Crowd-Sourced Shopping Project for practicality and interest, it’s a good idea for an app we think is worthwhile. Runners up were Farm Match and Regeneration Central, both for the same reasons: while being very good ideas I would love to see exist the real-world proposer opened up more logistical complexity than we wanted to manage for a class project. I want to help technology help people, and apps to connect businesses with employees and support resources are right up that alley.

Outside of school, I am currently hacking together a home automation system. I’m stubbornly refusing to use any of the main brand products, not for privacy concerns but the required connectivity. I prefer to have local control with remote backup, as opposed to how Alexa and Google Assistant work with remote servers controlling core logic. They aren’t likely to go anywhere and connectivity issues aren’t common but it irks me. I’m also working on a portfolio website to link from my resume, building the same design in multiple architectures.

I’m looking forward to taking this course with y’all, plan to read some other blogs and hopefully someone wanders into here to follow along with me.