Hello Developers my name is Sean Brill, I am senior at Penn State pursuing a degree in IST design & development. I originally came to penn state not really knowing what I wanted to do and was originally going for a Computer engineering degree. Being a freshman not knowing how to study or manage time effectivley lead me to change my major after being scared of not finishing on time. My cousin who graduated from penn state two years prior informed about the IST major.
I started my coding journey with an introduction to python class where I was completley lost and unsure of what I was doing. I was able to get by in the class but at the time I didn;t realize this is the type of work I will be doing for the rest of my career.
After switching my major I needed to take another python class over the summer to catch up. This is where I started to really understand things and I was honestly having alot of fun doing my assignments. I liked it so much that I would put extra hours in just putting extra features to the code and little easter eggs that my professor probably never bothered to look at.
Next semester I was required to take a course on Java, coming from python as my first language Java seemed really intimidating at first. I was not used to staticly typed variables or using curley braces. Overtime whike taking vigorous notes I got pretty decent at Java as well, I learned all about classes, inheritence, polymorphism, overloading, using databases, and even made applications using java swing GUIs.
My next coding class was the hardest coding class I've taken at Penn State.. IST 311. In this java oriented class we learned all about data structres and design patterns. We had to implement Linked lists, stacks, polls, ques, trees, heaps, graphs, and sorting algorithims. This class was really interesting and brought my game to a whole new level.
The summer of 2021 I landed an internship at consulting company Seisan LLC. During my internship I learned an incredible amount about Full stack development. Coming into this internship I had no prior experience with HTML, Javavascript,CSS, and C#. Throught my time here I have coded three websites using ASP .NET Core and one with NUXT js. I have implemented AWS Cognito into two of the sites to handle signup/sign in/ verification, and forgot password. I have also been able to implement AWS dynamo db into another site to use for serverless db functionality. I gained experience with stripe api and mailchimp api. One of our recent projects I had to connect to an old IBM computer known as as400 from java to upload employee time card entries into their system. Looking back it's amazing for me to see how far I've come. From being confused by simple python programs to being able execute and implement real world solutions for sites and applications that real people will use.
Everyone has to start somewhere, I came along way and I have so much more to learn and infinite room to develop my abilites, If you've gotten this far thanks for reading about my experiences as a developer so far!
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