I'm Nick, a software engineer living in Mountain View; a long way from my rural hometown in Wilmington, Ohio. Early in my life I fell in love with video games and, possessing all of the infinite wisdom of a 12 year old, decided that I wanted to be a programmer.
When I was 16, my high school gave me the option to go to college full-time. I grasped the opportunity and immediately signed up for programming courses. By the end of my first year, I had written several command-line D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) tools in C++, created a D&D campaign manager in SQL and had programmed my own Blackjack game in Java. Programming had become about more than just the games, it was a never-ending series of puzzles to solve - and I was completely in love.
In 2015, I applied to App Academy began teaching myself Ruby. I was accepted into the program after three rounds of interviews, packed my bags and moved across the country to make my dreams a reality. You can check out my experience at a/A on my blog.
For the next 9 months I worked as a full-stack (Django + Angular 1) software engineer at, Paradata, a supply-chain management startup in San Jose. In typical startup fashion, we burned a bit too hot and the company went into emergency mode - which I was informed I wouldn't be a part of - and so I started my next job search.
After a couple of spectacular* interviews, I decided to buckle down and start
studying again. I would go to the library,
steal borrow a whiteboard, and talk to myself for hours while
solving problems in Cracking
the Coding Interview.
*I got rejected a lot. It's embarassing, but I forgot how to identify when
to use a trie. I wouldn't
have hired me either.
After being a mad, muttering hermit for some time* I reached out to my App Academy
friend at Google and asked if he could
drop a referral for me. I started the long** interview process, and eventually
landed a job working on internal infrastructure for
Google Mobile Services.***
*2 months
**2 months
***aka Google Play Services
These days, I'm working on Project Nitrogen and have been playing around with Kotlin.
Stack - Angular, Django, Postgres, deployed on Heroku
High level - PoE Trade Ninja is a currency trading data acquisition and analysis application for the video game Path of Exile's online marketplace.
Want more specifics? Check out the readme on my GitHub by hovering over the picture.
Nexproc is a lightweight, single page team productivity app inspired by Asana. It is deployed on Rails' RESTful MVC framework and utilizes a custom API that is patched over Backbone's existing Model, Collection, and View structures to drastically DRY up the codebase. Nexproc also uses an embedded, multi-room, Node.js and Socket.io chat application. Realtime chat. Yum.
A JavaScript and jQuery version of the classic arcade game,
Snake.
With an explosive twist.
A complete Ruby implementation of Chess that runs directly in the $bash terminal. $bash Chess captures arrow-key inputs from the user to implement a helpful UI for piece movement. $bash Chess also features a fully functional, hyper-agressive, and, quite honestly, rather stupid AI. Go ahead, beat it to death.
