Dan the Developer
I’ve developed software professionally for 3 years.
I’ve worked for both a large and a mid-size company where I did all the things software developers do: coding, testing, debugging, reviewing pull requests, clarifying requirements, estimating work effort, setting up infrastructure, fixing bugs, and so on. It amazes me how much of software development doesn’t involve writing the actual code.
If someone looked at my resume, they’d probably call me an API Developer. That’s because I am. One of these days, I’d like to become a Full-Stack Developer; but for now, I’m an API guy.
Also, while I’ve never been an actual team lead in my professional career, I used to fill that role in college. I hope to become one in the future.
Like many other software engineers, I’ve programmed in different areas as well. I worked with cloud computing, natural language processing, and high performance computing. I even dabbled in Unity game development to teach elementary school children how to trace code.
However, my crown achievement has to be acing my first three Computer Science classes using only Vim, an SSH connection to a remote Linux terminal, and a dream.1 I mean, I rocked this setup for the Eight Queens puzzle in Algorithms class, not just for printing character diamonds in CS 101.
You can check out my work at the links below. Also, feel free to browse a complimentary timeline of my growth as a computer nerd (free of charge!).
My Work
GitHub
Azure IoT Hub
Research Paper
Leadership Language NLP Research Paper
History of My Entire Career, I Guess
High School Beginnings
As a home-schooled kid, I wrote a couple small programs in C# and C++ using books and guides. This was the start of my development career.
Start Computer Science @ Clemson University
I also chose to minor in Mathematics. I nearly switched majors to it until Algorithms and Data Structures reminded me that CS was fun.
Prosthetics Limb Sensor Research
Worked with another student writing code for an Arduino to communicate its sensor readings to a smartphone via BlueTooth.
CUHackit 2018
Worked in a team of four to create a web app using AWS and Flask which tracks glucose levels for a diabetic. We did not finish it.
CUHackit 2019
Worked with two other friends to develop a text-to-speech web tool which translates CS terms into Shakespearean renditions and produces audio of the resulting text using AWS services.
CSE Research Intern Summer REU @ Clemson University
Contributed to the development of an educational video game in Unity and C#, which was used for CS education among elementary students at a summer camp.
HackGT 6 Hackathon @ GA Tech
Team lead for a group of three friends where we demoed a web app that analyzes text for abusive language using NLP and ML techniques. This is where I was offered an interview with NCR.
Keyword Extraction Capstone Project
Used NLP and ML methods to extract keywords from thousands of documents for a company client and presented the findings in a white paper.
CUHackit 2020
Led a team of four friends to create an app that would map the geographical impact of your tweets on Twitter, but we never finished due to technical roadblocks.
Graduate B.S. Computer Science @ Clemson University
Minor in Mathematics. Summa Cum Laude.
NCR Corporation (now NCR Voyix), Software Engineer I & II
Connected many API layers in the SaaS digital banking platform in a Java and Spring framework. Worked with GCP, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Azure IoT Hub Load Testing Research Paper Published
Another student and I simulated a manufacturing IoT environment on Clemson’s high performance computing cluster to evaluate Microsoft Azure IoT Hub performance and costs at scale.
Leadership Language Research Paper Published
Led a team of students with faculty and staff advisors to devise a method for analyzing leadership language in text using NLP techniques. The study revealed discrepancies in how student interns and their mentors describe their leadership proficiency. The paper won the 2022 Tyler Award!
LTN Global Communications,
Software Engineer
Initially worked with device drivers in JavaScript and C++, but moved to a video streaming web application in Node.js and HTML/CSS/JS.
Gap Year
Taking a gap year to improve my mental health and come back stronger than ever.
How It Feels Sometimes
- I do not exclusively code in Vim today. Maybe I’d be a true programmer if I did, but IDEs are nice, and I was too dumb to consider using them at the time. ↩︎