Bob’s Blog

The semester is almost up, and mine’s been a good one. Admittedly, that’s mostly because it’s my last. That’s right, I’m graduating! I only had three classes left to take this semester, so it was a very easy one. One of my classes this semester focused on Software Engineering. As a learning exercise, the class was organized into a company and worked on an ongoing project started two or three semesters ago. That project is called the Twenty Minute Genealogist. It’s purpose is to make it possible to get meaningful genealogy work done in just 20 minutes a week. The project is still in its infancy and a working version isn’t yet available, but the demo is very promising and the feature set very compelling. If you’re into genealogy work and want to see better tools available for the task, check out http://twentygen.cs.byu.edu/ and take a look at the Twenty Minute Genealogist.

It’s been some time since I’ve written an update on me. Me last post was back in April, and for some time all I wrote about was ethics and computers. So it’s about time I wrote something for personal.

I spent this summer working at Google in Irvine. The Irvine office was created a few years ago when Google bought a company called DMarc, which specialized in automated radio management and ad insertion. Google bought the company to get into the audio ads business, and has been doing decently. Most of the office still works in various areas of the radio space, although a significant portion has moved to TV ads and various reporting areas as well.

I worked on the team that runs the auction software that decides what ads get played when. I built a couple of reporting dashboards that gave visibility into the auction process. It was a great experience that convinced me that I really want to pursue a career as a software engineer.

At the end of the summer I interviewed for conversion to full-time. It took some time to get through the process, particularly with the economic troubles and hiring slows, but eventually I was extended an offer for a position in Test out in Boulder, CO. That means that my job will be to write automated test suites and generally work on quality control software. I’m really excited to start working. But first I have to get through school =P.