Hello, my name is Dakota Cromer. I’ve been at SNHU for approximately 3 years. Prior to SNHU, I was at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 8 years completing several research papers, but had to withdraw due to financial reasons. I currently work at the Intercontinental Exchange as a devOps engineer on their trading platform.
My first alma mater was Georgia Tech. That school is not for the feint of heart. The entire computer science program is designed to put students in direct competition with each other in an attempt to drive innovation and encourage outside the box thinking. That coupled with the fact that many students that attend the school are nothing short of brilliant, results in a very high stress environment but easily a very enriching program that changed my life.
During my time at SNHU, I learned how to use MongoDB, I’ve learned how to create SQL queries, and I’ve learned how to write pythonic code and create an application in python.
During my time at Georgia Tech, I learned how to write in java, how to create algorithms, and handle sorting algorithms, and how to calculate bigO notation for an algorithm. I also learned how to create compilers and how to write intel x86 assembly code.
All throughout my time at both SNHU and Georgia Tech, I learned about the Software development lifecycle, or SDLC. I learned the difference between waterfall and agile development work, and I worked on teams with others to create applications using the various SDLC methodologies.
I am hopeful that these skills will help me to further my career at ICE and perhaps other jobs in the future.
My portfolio is a series of three different artifacts from three different projects. The first project (see Enhancement 1) builds on a project that I spent time working on with my peers at SNHU. This project is a culmination of a jukebox with a playlists that a user is able to select from the playlist and see a list of songs. My enhancement was the introduction of a search function that allows the user to query wikipedia for the song title and see more information about the song.
My second enhancement is a quick sorter that takes in a CSV file and will run the quicksort algorithm on it by the first column in the file. The program will then output the data in sorted form. This is a programmatic way to sort data using the quicksort algorithm and is a good demonstration of my understanding of sorting algorithms as quick sort is one of the more difficult to implement.
My third and final enhancement is an interview project I was requested to make for a job interview I took. The prompt I was given was as follows
“An example of the CRUD functionality of a telephone book using SQL Express database and window forms or web for the inputs?” What I used to accomplish this was first building out an HTML page, then using JavaScript to execute a PHP function which handled the database inputs. You could also select from Create, Read, Update, and Delete.
The planned enhancement I worked on is the creation of the mySQL database. I didn’t end up getting the job because I didn’t understand the prompt correctly and I found out later that they wanted me to provide an SQL database file as well. This artifact contains that completed mySQL database file as well as the html form and the corresponding javascript and php to handle the CRUD operations for the form.
My time at SNHU and at Georgia tech has prepared me for the rigors of being a programmer. Long late nights coupled with early mornings have been in no short supply. The result is a set of skills i’ve been able to hone into something I can be proud to called me.