Christopher Young

Intro

Rock climbing ‘problems’ require persistence and determination as well as an eye for problem solving. I have honed those skills over two decades of rock climbing and I carry them into my career as a software engineer. In developing a persistence and determination to work tirelessly at a problem, as well as being able to think outside the box to approach problems from different angles, I am uniquely able to come up with creative solutions and apply them to my work. In addition to my problem solving skills, my background as a construction project manager taught me the value in looking at the big picture. This allows me to not get too focused on one problem, take a broad view of a project, and determine the best course of action. My work in construction also gave me a love for seeing a project get built from the ground up, every step of the way, to completion. That love is something I’ve found in software developing as well. Being able to see a project start as just a few lines of code grow into a usable product that I can be proud of is one of the best feelings.

During my time at App Academy, a highly competitive and rigorous coding boot camp, working on projects was definitely my favorite. My project Petstagram, an instagram clone, is a great showcase of my frontend skills with modern CSS styling along with agile data manipulation through React components and Redux store. The entire frontend is written with JavaScript, and the backend routes use Python/Flask along with SQLAlchemy models for interacting with our PostgreSQL database. Besides developing my skills with all these technologies and satisfying my love for learning, working on this project showed me how much fun working with a team can be. Learning from each other, supporting each other, and leaning on each other’s strengths were all aspects that made for a great team environment.

My unique path to becoming a software engineer, along with my lifelong hobby of climbing, give me specific attributes that I believe make me a strong candidate. I also know that my strong team skills and passion for learning would be meaningful assets. If anyone wishes to get in touch with me to collaborate or just to get more information feel free to contact me on LinkedIn or email me directly at ChrisC.Young1@gmail.com.

climbOn

ClimbOn is a clone of the site Quora.com, but specifically for all of your questions and answers related to rock climbing! On this site I used React components with CSS styling to display everything you see. The backend is built out with Python/Flask and a PostgreSQL database. SQLAlchemy is the ORM used to communicate with that database, and WTForms is used for custom validation.

On this project, in a short 2 weeks, I was able to implement the two key features, Questions and Answers, as well as a dynamic search feature that auto-populates with questions that already exist in the database. Future features to be implemented include categories and upvotes.

Petstagram

Petstagram is instagram for your pets! This was a group project where we used Python/Flask to build out the backend routes, and JavaScript React components to build out the frontend. We also made use of Redux store to dynamically render any data from the backend.

In this project we were able to implement many similar features to Instagram such at Posts, Likes, Follows, Notifications. We were also able to use AWS s3 buckets for cloud storage of images. The dynamic Follows feature which allows you to follow/unfollow other users from various places on the site, was the feature I personally spent the most time on.

Extension Hunt

Extension Hunt is a close of the site ProductHunt, where users can post their own VScode extensions, as well as comment and upvote any extensions posted to the site.

This app includes DOM manipulation authentication to allow login from any page of the application. It also ustilizes mulitple many-to-many database relationships to allow for clean dataflow.

Skills

My skills cover frontend development with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and React/Redux along with some basic familiarity with Jinja and Pug. For backend work I have deployed Express and Sequelize along with a PostgreSQL database, but I also learned Python just so I could use Flask and it's related libraries.

I have also worked with various related technologies like docker and heroku for deployment, Amazon Web Services for cloud storage, and GitHub for version control.

Contact

• GitHub

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';