Alma Mater

Apologies for the late post, but I've been a madman up until last week. After spring break, I had to kick all three of my class projects into high gear. In senior project, I had been spinning my wheels on a particular problem, and finally called in our Google sponsor, Scott, to help me out. We and the rest of the team had a couple of late-night hackathon sessions, and really made some huge progress. After Scott showed me how to incorporate my own PaintWeb tools the right way and started me on a selection system, I was able to make some nice enhancements to our 2D canvas and toolset. In the end, we handed off a senior project that I'm proud to put my name on, and proud that AgentSheets will carry forward.

In Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, our group wrapped up our design and did our three week-long iterations of development, and ended up with a decent proof-of-concept; an Android app for managing chores, along with a RESTful web service backend. We had planned a lot more, but with only 3 weeks to develop, it's difficult to get a finished product. And finally, my Data Mining teammate and I were able to wrap up our medical insurance mining project gracefully, even if we didn't find the juicy patterns we were looking for.

So that's it. I've graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, College of Engineering and Applied Science, with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. It was an excellent experience, and I'll always be happy to call CU my alma mater.

The graduation ceremonies were pretty much as expected; fairly boring in-and-of-themselves, but emotionally meaningful as a rite of passage. Many of my family and friends were able to make it for the Engineering Recognition Ceremony, and then for the University Commencement, I had Ashley, Chris and Holly cheering me on. After that, Ashley threw me a party at her mother's house, and I got to see so many of the people I love! Ashley and Holly collaborated to make my cake a special surprise, a reference to the game Portal. All of the photos are online for your viewing pleasure!

Since then I've mostly been taking it easy, cleaning the house a bit, catching up on my personal projects, and the like. I did have one exciting adventure, though; our senior project sponsor Scott invited us to Google I/O Extended at the Google Boulder office. It was a blast! I mean, sure, it was just sitting around watching live videos of the real thing in San Francisco, but I got to meet people from industry, get a feel for their attitudes and opinions, learn about what Google's been up to and where they're going, and even got a swag bag! If I can't make it to San Francisco next year, I'll definitely have to see about coming back to Extended.

As far as future plans, I expect to stay at Northrop Grumman for the time being. I could eventually see myself pursuing a Master's degree, but for now, I'm excited to see where life in the working world takes me. It's a wide world out there, just waiting for me!