Introduction

Hello, my name is Andy Fields. Welcome to my capstone blog!

I guess I'll get right in to the required talking points:

1. After graduation I plan on finding a job in the Austin area, preferably in a smallish start-up company. The one thing I can't stand is the rather depressing corporate culture of larger companies. And besides, I think I will stay motivated better in the highly volatile world of the start-ups.
2. My computing interests focus on systems design where large complicated systems need to be designed so that its many parts all function together smoothly and hopefully in a near optimal manner. Naturally, the only system of the requisite size and complexity that I can work on at the moment are game engines, which I have written a few myself.
3. My strengths are focused around low-level programming using C. It seems to me that less people are interested in this area but there is still a significant demand for these skills, which is a good situation for me. Along with this, I feel that I have the useful ability to break large, complicated projects into smaller and more easily manageable problems.
4. My favorite computer science project would be the semester-long Operating Systems assignment where we implemented the main components of an operating system that were actually able to run and work together in an emulator (and presumably on the real hardware, but I wasn't brave enough to try that).
5. The final project in Software Engineering was the worst project since it was only assigned at the end of the semester and only one person on the team had the necessary skills to do the project. I felt as though the project had nothing to do with the class since we did not learn any of the skills required to do the project.
6. Social networking sites have changed the way that many around the world choose to communicate with their friends, family, and basically anyone they meet. The other important trend is the adoption of truly portable computer devices like the iPhone, Android, and tablets.
7. My typical pattern for coding was to spend an enormous amount of time designing the entire program out on paper and trying to identify all the problems that I might encounter so that the program would be "perfect". Needless to say, the projects were rarely finished. However, more recently I have been working in a more Agile fashion, an adoption that was helped along by my discovery of the Git version control tool. In this scheme I only look ahead to the next task at hand and make changes to the existing program as they are needed. In this way, there is always something "deliverable" and seeing things working, even in a non-optimal way, keeps me motivated and therefore increases the likelihood of the project being completed.
8. Here is my picture: