I am a software engineer originally from small-town Slinger, Wisconsin. Through entrepreneurship, internships, and schooling I have amounted to over 5 years of experience with professional development. My characteristics in my professional life coincide very closely with my traits in my personal life.
StoryLinq is a website that allows you to get rid of all your fears when it comes to presenting. It lays out an exact template that can be used every time that will make your presentation instantly better. It features training from the expert coach Pat Quinn who has spent over 30 years dedicating his time to refining the structure. You won't find a more valuable service that completely changes how you speak, it provides you a place to store all your content, learn from structured videos, get real time coaching, and get feedback on any of your scripts.
As the only developer, it was my job to take Pat Quinn's content and turn it into a viable website. In the current version, I use React for the frontend and Nodejs for the backend. The service is run on a private server that I maintain. All the user information is stored in a MySQL database that is also hosted on the server.
My internship project was to create an internal website that would provide the business with dynamic data visualizations to help the team better understand the relationship between complicated data. As a software engineer, I know that a lot of times data from a database can be hard to understand as most times the variables don't make sense to people that didn't help design the system. Thus I offered a solution, have the backend not be in variables and rows, but instead in charts that can be compared next to each other.
The project was built in Angular for the frontend and Spring backend. The site was hosted on the Kohl's internal network and was only visible to individuals with access.
I started this during my internship with Messer. I was just getting into the world of websites and I was realizing how much of a useful skill it could be, so I looked more into it myself. Each of my projects were based in basic HTML, css, and javascript for the frontend while using only PHP for any backend that I needed. I used SQL for any database information, and I tracked the usage of the websites using Google Analytics.
This was an amazing learning experience because I was able to sit down and learn everything for myself. I taught myself about elements of design and figured out how to implement it all in css. I was being paid to have fun and learn, not so bad.
Some of my websites include classroommentalhealth.com, patquinn.com, and my own personal website declangundrum.com. I built each of those and they never scaled so I let them be. Another one of those was originally StoryLinq. StoryLinq started as a very basic application and began to show promise, so I took it more seriously and dedicated most of my time to it. If you are wondering what StoryLinq is, please scroll up in my job experience to find more about it.
For two summers I got my hands nice and dirty while sealing driveways. I was fully responsible for finding all the sales, material, and execution of the job. The job required everything from fully cleaning the asphalt, putting tar over any cracks present, and putting sealant over all the asphalt. This was an amazing experience because of how much I learned.
I learned what it was like to be fully by yourself. I made my hours. My effort could reflect my sales. I had to manage resources. I had to manage a small team. I had to deal with customers, and I finally fully realized that having an accountant is important. It was pretty bitter hard work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.