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.

Post numero dos! Yippee! So this post is not in December like I said it might be. In fact, I’ve been married for more than six months now. Married life is definitely the good life. We moved into Wymount family housing after the wedding and lived there until school got out. Then we came to Midland, MI, for the summer. We’re really enjoying it here. It’s a quiet town, in a way. Most of the town is employed by Dow Chemical or one of its subsidiaries. We’re both interns at Dow this summer. Danielle is in the Accounts Receivable group and I ended up in IT auditing.

My first audit was fun. I worked with EDI and Lockbox. Both are essentially non-user interfaces, and Lockbox doesn’t even have it’s own processes anymore. For Lockbox we documented how it’s not it’s own application anymore, and for EDI we did some security and change management review. Since the audit ended, I’ve been working on the department website. We’ve been upgrading from MS Acces to SQL Server, which took a lot of work revamping the server scripting. We’re also converting an old Access application to a web form. That is turning out to be a very fun project. In the next couple weeks I’ll start work on my second and final audit of the summer.

Danielle, meanwhile, has been writing documentation and determining global policy for certain processes in Accounts Receivable. Last week and this week have also been quarter close, so she’s been busy working on that as well.

Life’s treating us well here in Midland. It’s peaceful, inexpensive, and we’re making big bucks as interns. We’re saving up money for the coming school year to pay tuition and housing (though housing and food I can usually pay out of my part-time job’s wages). Good times!

This is my first post. We’ll see if I ever make a second. I’m really just putting this blog here for the fun of it. Feel free to check back every once in a while.

I’ll probably be using this as a secondary journal, so it might be boring for most people. But if you want to know what’s up in my life and get info about me and my family, come take a look.