ProDev

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Professional Development



(No longer currently) I'm currently taking the Java + Android + Salesforce boot camp hosted by CNM Stemulus Center located in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico where they have various Professional Development workshops. This page is dedicated to the content I produce for those workshops. Enjoy.


MyResume V.4

My Resume V.3

My Resume V.2

My Resume V.1




Purpose

Qualitative vs Quanitative

Through my career I’ve spent most of my time servicing over 100 people per day in both guest services and a cashier for a hotel and cafeteria. I’ve handled, at most, up to $4000, in one day, in cash, checks, and or credit card transactions throughout my career with proper cash handling methods. My communication was very effective to these customers, as I was very professional.. The problem I have is being too professional and sounding like a robot. I also have very good personable communication skills, which I used well with friends, co workers and management, and it was that quality that was missed out in my customer service. Before leaving my last job, my manager told me that my communication skills were great but faltered with the guests since I just sounded monotone.

In customer service, resolving customer complaints is a big deal. No matter how good the product can be, there are still user issues for multiple aspects of the product that customers will complain on. At my previous workplace, a portion of my 100, or more, per day customer base would come to my co workers and I with their frustrations and complaints. It was up to us to understand the issues fully, and resolve them the best we can. Proper training was given for certain issues, but people are unpredictable, and knowing the answer for the complaint doesn't mean it's the right answer for the customer. I was very good at resolving issues, but my biggest problem was actually listening fully, and understanding what it was people actually wanted, (free stuff.)

While I worked at the cafeteria, servicing at least 100 students a day, I tried my best to make it a habit to do extra work. Most of the workers in that building were either cleaning, cooking or serving food. I stood at the cash register logging people who enter, by either cross checking ID's or money exchange. That feeling like I should be working to the same extent as everyone else killed me. I did my best to clean up counters, get fruit out, replinish cups, but in the end I overworked myself, and never felt confident.


Passion Project

My generation was brought up by computers. Computers have always been a large part of my life and I’ve even custom built my personal computer. Going through school and getting my Hospitality and Tourism degree, I was convinced that this path would be that of my dreams. In reality, I always had this thought that I wanted to work in computer hardware or software. Went through with my degree anyway, got a job or two, even a volunteering gig, and after a few years, decided that I just didn’t like it. At this point, having used a computer everyday, I finally came up with the idea to get into the development industry. Actually, I spent some time first trying to get another job in sales, which, obviously, did not work out. The thought process of having to go back to school and learn to become a developer de-motivated me. I didn’t want to do it, and was too lazy to do it. Development was a work type I really wanted to pursue, but I just didn’t want to take the time to figure it all out. I wanted to get a sales job, and teach myself some language as I lived on. The thought process of learning a language kept me from actually learning the language. I finally decided to commit, and now I'm here 9/26/2018 taking the Java bootcamp through CNM. Finally enacting my passion for computers through learning the Java programming language, and eventually taking off my switched career path once finished.


Golden Circle

golden-circles

Elevator Pitch

Hello, I'm Alex. I am a software and app developer. I have a purpose to make people's lives easier with the use of their personal devices through such software and apps. I'd be happy to explain further if you'd like, here's my business. Have a wonderful day!


Week 1 of Weekly Reflections

The beginning of week 1 was pretty rough. Seeing java in it's full form was very intimidating. Going through it all and taking the time to understand things (still struggling to understand) was pretty exhausting. Of course, now being day 5 of the week, I can safely say that, compared to day 1, everything makes a lot more sense. Nick is a good instructor and is pretty articulate in what he says. The reading also helped bring more understanding to what it was we were all doing. Looking forward to doing more,


Persuasion

Stove Top Burners

stove-top-burners

My path to accomplish my goals outlined ont he stove top burners would be:


Organization Research

1. Visit Albuquerque (not-for-profit)


2. Amore Pizzeria (for profit)


Week 2 Reflections

Week 2 was still pretty exhausting, but not as bad as week 1. Getting use to waking up in the morning kind of. Compared to week 1, things are starting to make more sense, but still got a lot to learn. The curriculum is great, and I like the idea of spending time out of class understanding what we just saw. Our first quiz was this week, which went well. I belive it took me 3 trys to get a 90%, which was alright, but the big test is in 2 weeks. I'm confident I'll do better then. This week we also started talking more about projects.go that to decide sometime this weekend. Other than all that, everything has been well.


Identity

Career Pictures Paragraph

career pics

The above images (in the main image,) in order from left to right, I believe portray accurately what my career is currently like, and what I expect it to be like in the future. We'll start with the picture of the table being put together. In this example the table is a work in progress, that's close to being finished. I believe the same is so for my career, I finally made my way into the deep dive bootcamp, and am now making my way through it. Now, in less than 3 months my work in progress will be accomplished. The next pictures portrays a statue which I find to represent contentment. In 3 - 5 years I want to be content with who I am and what it is I'm doing. How do I bridge the gap? Finish the bootcamp like I said, get hired in the industry and continue to build my technical experience to have the confidence to finally live contently.


Week 3 Reflections

Week 3 was pretty heavy on android, which was still a pretty neat learning experience. We've started working on our personal android app projects as of Friday, and we proposed our capstone ideas. Mine wasn't too popular, but we all can't have winning ideas (for the record, it was a music sync game where objects synced tot he beats of music fly at you and you have to swipe them, poke them, or dodge them.) Getting started on Android is going to be a tough process, but I tend to not think of the process, and just take eveything one step at a time. Looking forward to SQL teachings and google auth next week.


Capstone Team Reflection

I have Brian Bleck and Dina Robinal as captstone teammates. We met to play the initial game of Forbidden Island which we were close to winning. The only thing that kept us was the time. Reading the rules and understanding them as a team was pretty straightforward, and as we played on we really started to command moves as a team for our respective turns to best complete the game. Even for the second game, our input directly impacted our moves and got us the victory. Surprisingly Forbidden Island is a pretty great resource for getting to know your team. After the second game, which was after lunch, we got back together in our team and discussed more about our project. We have a pretty basic idea of what we want to push out for the means of meeting the capstone requirements, and what we would like to implement for future iterations. Our discussion, plus some user stories got us to really understand the project we were taking on, and what was expected of us to push out. Our team covers a wide range of coding profeciency but I'm absolutely sure we'll be able to figure out this project together, get it done together, and learn so much in the process. Looking forward the month to come.


Our project team is known as Project Locus :


Week 4 Reflections

A whole month has officially gone by, and I know there's still a lot for me to learn and understand. We had our first exam, that allowed us 2 attempts, which I was very fortunate for since I failed first time around. The practical portion will be next week, and I'm looking forward to actually writing code that I'll be graded upon. Up to this point it's mostly been us having code thrown at us with little discussion (except group discussion, the other students are great), and us taking the time to understand what it was just thrown (i.e. reading our textbooks, looking online, etc.). I'm confident that my studying will pay off though, and I'll have an acceptable score in the end. This week we were able to establish our capstone teams. As I previsouly stated in my "Capstone Team Reflection" my team consists of Brian Bleck and Dina Robinal. After spending some time with the both of them, I'm confident we'll be able to get our work done for the project by understanding the steps we need to take, and how our final product for the scope of the project should be.


Week 5 Reflections

This week was a bit frustrating for me. We started off making an app that generates mege million numbers and stores them. The idea was neat, but very complicated to code. Not the frustrating part though. We continued on to mostly working on our personal apps. I got a reading app, and already had a pretty neat UI for the moment, but I also needed a book that I could place into my app's database and have it accessed.
The frustrating part came when I finally finished creating my book and had to put it on the app's database. We've made a couple of apps that used databases before, but for some reason I'm having difficulty understanding what classes need to made, and how they interact with each other. On top of that, I found out that databases don't take PDF or .doc files too well, so all the formatting in my book needs to wiped away so that to be placed in a txt file that can be easily accessed. I could put a PDF reader, but that's something I want to save for the future, since I just want to get things working first.
(I had made a kids book, which at the moment, can't formatted into my app.) For the weekend I'm probably going to work on figuring this all out, and do my best to get it done since at the moment it's a bit frustrating. Also this weekened I'll meeting with my other capstonet teammates to figure out where to start with our project as well. We'll be seeing some Kotlin next week, so that'll at least be exciting.


Week 6 Reflections (The Half Way Point)

The end of this week marks the half way point of this boot camp. Just in 6 weeks I've learned so much about java and android that I was sure would take me years to learn. I'm extremely happy to have made it this far, and looking forward to the next half.

As far as work goes for this week, I was able to work upon my personal android app and got my book to show fully in app, through a web view. It's able to show pictures and text, which is what concerned me last week's reflection.
I also included a timer that starts when you press the play button on the top, and stops when you press the pause button. I still want to implement a way for the start button to continue the timer after you press the pause button because at the momnet it just crashes the emulator. This weekend my capstone team is going to meetup and start coding for what we need in our project. There's a lot of complexity with what we're doing, so we needed a little direction before we could start. We're all going to create a UI before the meetup, discuss our designs, and start implementing in our build. This app is giong to be very frustrating, but we'll take it in one step at a time. By the way, our app is basically a social app where you can send invitations to people in your immediate area out to coffee or join them in a party or event.


1 Millioin Cups Impressions

(Almost forgot to write this up.) Went to 1 Million Cups Wednesday morning, and it was early and cold. It was held at Fatpipe ABQ located in the old Albuquerque High School on Broadway. First impressions: it was pretty neat. The people were nice, the presentations were nice, and the coffee that early in the morning was also nice. I really only talked to 2 people who weren't students. The first man, I believe his name was John, owned a business that coached people, remotely, on their nutrition. They also gave insight on exercise and supplements. Poor John was had hearing problems, so he couldn't hear me properly amongst the loud crowd. The second person I talked to, his name was Mike, and he worked for Sunrun Solar. Even though he was just visiting, and not really in the market for a developer, he did tell me a, what I believe to be, motivational story. I had told him that I was in the process of making a simple android app as a project for the class. Mike told me that his cousin had made a very simple app during his college days to keep track of his classes. Later on Microsoft went on to buy that app off of his cousin for $14 million. Simple apps do make a big deal, and I truly do believe my app can be a big deal. Other than that, I made sure my prodev buddy Chantelle was good to go, and we left to go back to class, once again, in the cold.


Weeks 7 and 8 Reflection

I forgot to write up my week 7 reflection, so I'll just integrate it here. We've spent a good amount of time these past 2 weeks working on our projects. I've made a lot of progress with my personal project, some credit to Chris for helping me with database stuff. The database side still confuses me, but I understant it more than when I began.

I've implemented Google Sign In, and along with it, a sign out button. Once someone has successfully signed in, they become a new user in my app. I included an info section that shows both display name, email, and how many books they've read. I've also created a gridview for my books, or book, since I only have 1. Created two new entities in my database the past week, and am now working on how to keep the user from finishing the same book twice and have it displayed as 2 books read instead of 1. Also wokring on setting a time read for the book after the user stopped the timer and proceeded to the quiz. I'm probably the only one who can currently make sense of what I just said, but those are the things that I am truly working on at the moment. Then work on documentation stuff soon too.

Will be meeting with capstone team on Sunday. Still think our project is a bit intimidating, but we're going to do our best. We got some UI stuff figured out, and will probably go hard on database soon.


Last Month Reflection

I've now finished the bootcamp. I would continue on to develop my capstone team project's app which was a social media invitatoin app known as Join Me. It was a pretty neat experience and we got it mostly done. Presented the app in front of 300 or so people at a demo day mixer, met several people, and presented at my end of bootcamp graduation. It was all very eventful, and the bootcamp was very intense, but I've come a long way and have learned so much. A new year, and a new career.