Favorite projects

(upbeat music) - So one thing that I really enjoyed working on was a mobile app for a bank. And what I was tasked with was developing the check deposit system, so whenever you take your phone and you take a picture of your check at home so you don't have to go to the bank. Being able to develop that and getting it working on all sorts of different phones was really rewarding. - So I've really enjoyed learning how to use automation effectively. That's what really gets me excited is how can we use automation to drive insights into our software? How can we automation to get rid of those boring things that we have to do every week or everyday, whatever it might be? So I've really enjoyed working on projects like that where I have been able to dig in and get some insights into why things are working the way they are or how we can make changes that will actually drive customer value. - If I want to talk about my favorite project, there was one where we we're trying to do something for the first time in the organization. There was that technology that we working on which was not used by any other project, so we really didn't have much of help. All of us were so young that we didn't even know the best practices at all, so we just choose to code by looking at the documentation and the information over the internet. There was a team at a different location. So there's placed at one and some placed at the other location and that we used to not see each other. There was only that phone and the voice over IP that you have and you talk over that. It was troubled times, but I think that was one of the best experiences that I had, because the kind of communication we used to establish across the teams placed at different locations, without even seeing each other, I think was an amazing experience. - The most rewarding thing for me so far has been with teaching. And so being able to get these personal notes from students that have told me that I've helped them find their passion, I've helped them, make them feel like they belong here, those are probably the main reason why I still do what I do, is because I like the fact that I can help somebody find their passion and also help them feel like they belong here as well. - To date, my favorite project was one that I worked on at a managed hosting company in Dallas. And all of their asset information was stuff into a CRM system, customer contact system. It had no business being there, but when you're in startup mode, you just, you get things done and sometimes you make sacrifices. One of the problems they had was finding space in the racks that they had leased at level three for new servers as they were coming in. So I wrote a system that used handheld devices, which were fairly new at the time, and wrote a classic asp application that allowed the operations staff to go in look at a top down view of the data center, click on a rack and actually see a graphical representation of the rack and the servers that were in it. And the build center was able to start using it as a method for automating this entire process. - Really all of my favorite projects absolutely involved APIs, but sometimes it's creating them and sometimes it's consuming them. The magic of APIs is that you can combine things from different places. You can have your Twitter feed somehow combined with your fitness feed and you can get your calendar and say you've had a lot of meetings today, perhaps what you need to do now is yoga. Right, I mean the opportunities for combining the data that's available to us, are endless. And that's what I really love. - A project that I really liked that I worked on recently was a safety management system for airports. And what I liked about it was the problem we were trying to solve, which is helping airports better track their safety incidents and letting them mitigate risks through using our application. So I thought that was really neat to be involved in a project like that. - I've got a pet project that I started, probably four or five years ago, when my oldest son was in elementary school. The school, like many elementary schools is gotta raise money outside of the public funding and so every year they do a silent auction. And is said, you know, I could probably build you guys an app for that so you wouldn't have to do it in person. And it's been a great project for me, because much to the chagrin of the people that I work with there, the dismay, I've been rewriting it pretty regularly, so they'd say hey that works we can use it right? Yeah, but let me just update it. And so I've used that to learn Angular and TypeScript and number of other frameworks, just by rewriting pieces and parts of it to give me that learning ground. (upbeat music)