Work

While earlier projects had given me some experience with Java GUI development in JavaFX, I still had not yet used the older and more native Swing toolkit. In order to improve my skills in UI I watched a series of Youtube tutorials and created a simple text adventure game that introduced me to basic Java Swing concepts. Over the next couple of months in my free-time I would make several more updated versions of the game, each with more features than the last. This included sound effects, status indicators, shops, random-chance encounters, a basic storyline, and more. The final version was completed shortly after the end of my Sophomore year in college, and takes roughly 15 or so minutes to complete from start to finish.

At its completion this project was the one I had the most fun creating, largely because it involved a great deal of creative design and media-manipulation. While most of the illustrations are not mine and are just simply taken from the web (this was a personal project with no monetary goals, after all), all of them are edited using Photoshop in order to fit the art style of the game. The sound effects had to be modified as well; some of them hardly even sound like their original form anymore.

If you wish to play the game for yourself, you can download an .exe file here. You can also find the source code as well as the older versions of the game on my Github account.

Upon completing my Computer Science degree in Spring 2023, I found myself without any immediate job lined up. I ended up having a lot of free time on my hands since my current job at the time was only part-time. The previous Summer I had created the first iteration of this website using what little HTML and CSS I knew at the time (which also happened to be my first website ever). While I was proud of how it turned out, it was clear that there was room for significant improvement and so using my newfound free time, I took on the challenge of revamping it, incorporating the web skills I had acquired over the past year.

This version of my site puts much more focus on being responsive, compared to the first iteration which was designed without any regard to its usage on mobile devices. To help with this, I utilized the Bootstrap 5 CSS framework to carry some of the workload, though the design choices I made for the site required some amount of manually-coded responsive behavior using vanilla CSS. The end result was a website that combined many of the aesthetic choices of the first iteration with a superior layout and a more mobile-friendly design.

For now, I am quite happy with this website, though I don't doubt that in the future there may come a time when I will want to revamp the site again. If you are interested in seeing the first version of this website, you should be able to find it listed alongside my other projects.

One of many semester-long group assignments I did throughout my college career, I and a group of fellow students were tasked with planning, developing, testing, and deploying a Java-based application. Unlike previous group projects, however, this time it was required that Agile practices such as having weekly Scrum meetings and maintaining a Kanban board be included in our group's development process. The project was also supposed to be worked on via iterative development cycles as opposed to the more waterfall-based approach that I was used to from earlier assignments.

The project itself was a set of tools based around the Essence Standard, which is a framework for discussing the theory of software engineering that attempts to uncomplicate the software development process through the use of models, practices, and methods (if that sounds far too abstract for practical use, then you and I would be in agreement). In addition to the technologies used in the Acquire project, this assignment also made use of Javalin, TextFX, Hibernate ORM, and Docker - though I played no part in the implementation of the latter two technologies.

My primary contribution was the Essence Practice Creator, which was essentially a diagram-maker used to construct Essence graphs and export them as .png files. I was content with this, as the practice creator gave me experience in developing GUIs that I had largely missed in previous projects. A stand-alone version of the Essence Practice Creator can be downloaded here if you are interested (it is a .jar file; you must have Java installed on your machine for it to work).

Ultimately the scope of the project was a little too much for a group of four to handle in only two or so months, so the project is a little janky in some areas and downright unfinished in others. Nevertheless, our professor was impressed with what we were able to produce in the given time and gave us an A- on the assignment.

The semester-long group assignment for my Advanced OOP class, this project had me and two other students developing a game none of us had heard of before. What made this project unique was that it was meant to give us some introductory practices used in the real world; my team planned out how we were going to build the game by creating UML diagrams, wrote unit tests to see if our code was proficient, and tediously wrote in-depth comments for every method & class to ensure the code was well-documented. The project also familiarized me with important development tools such as Git and Gradle.

For my part, I was mostly involved in writing parts of the actual game logic and unfortunately wasn't particularly involved for the GUI creation created in JavaFX. Regardless, our project turned out well and earned our team a good grade - maybe an A-? I forget. As part of the assignment, our team needed to make a presentation video to demo the project, which I have posted here if you care to listen to a more in-depth explanation and showcase of the game.

I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment, largely due to the camaraderie & productivity of my group, and felt as though the project drastically improved my "soft" skills such as project management and the ability to work within a team.

The computer science major at Idaho State University has no required courses dedicated to web development. I realized it might be a problem if I graduated with a CS degree and still didn't understand HTML, so I enrolled in the few web development courses ISU does offer (all listed as Informatics classes, for some reason). Following my Spring 2022 semester I knew the basics of front-end development but I still lacked practical experience in designing a website from scratch. After seeing some friends of mine create on their own websites(mcdelius.com & obeliskcollective.com) I decided I would try to make one as well as a pet project to work on over the Summer.

As the site is mostly a series of static webpages, most of the 'code' is just HTML and CSS - though a little Javascript is used here and there. The site, like my current personal website, is currently hosted through Github Pages as it is both free and convenient to use, though in the future I may switch to another method of web-hosting as Github Pages does not support the use of server-side languages such as PHP. This means I have to use third-party tools in order to have a working contact form and an email associated with my website's domain-name, which is not something I'm super fond of. All the same, creating a website without the help of a website builder furthered my proficiency in the foundational skills needed for front-end web development.

Obviously this version of my website is no longer utilized as it has been replaced by the version you are currently using, though I do still have it hosted here if you want to check it out for yourself.