Interests
Pool
I have played pool in the American Poolplayers Association (APA) league for 5 years now. I started playing casually at the local bowling alley when I was 12 years old. Wherever life and the Navy took my family, it seemed like there was always a nearby recreational center or bowling alley with a pool table. I have always enjoyed playing and eventually invested in my own pool cue. While working at Comcast, I trained a new tech who was the captain of his local pool team. They needed an extra player, so I was invited to join. Since then I have played on and off throughout the years, joining one other pool team before landing on my current team. The APA assigns every player a skill level based on their ability and those skill levels are used to apply handicaps in each match. For example, a level 2 player needs to make only 19 balls to win their match opposed to a level 8 who needs to make 65 balls!
Yoga
My previous career was very physical, constantly carrying heavy equipment and cables, turning wrenches, and digging up damaged cable. Because of this, I did not always see the need to exercise. Once I started the Web Development program at Edmonds I realized that I needed to find another way to exercise. I tried yoga a few times when I had a gym membership and enjoyed it, but I wanted to be able to do it from home. Searching online, I came across 30 Days of Yoga, a video series on YouTube created by Adriene Mishler. Her videos take you from a complete beginner to more experienced yoga poses with what seems like very little effort. After completing the 30 Days of Yoga, I searched for more content from Adriene and found her website and a new video series for 2016: Yoga Camp. Practicing yoga daily has helped me to lose weight and alleviate chronic lower back and tailbone pain I was experiencing.
Algorithms
With web development, I have found a way to bridge the gap between my creative talent, my love for technology, and my technical skill. When not in school, I have been listening to podcasts centered on web development and working through online coding courses. I listen to the Code Newbie, Changelog, JavaScript Jabber, and The Web Ahead podcasts and work through courses on Codecademy, Code School, and Free Code Camp. I enjoy all aspects of web development, but my favorite part is definitely programming with either JavaScript or PHP. Free Code Camp has basic, intermediate, and advanced algorithm challenges as part of their front-end curriculum. I have worked through the all of the basic challenges and half of the intermediate challenges so far and I am saving all of the algorithms I write to a GitHub project. The challenges usually involve parsing user input or have other real-world applications, so as part of the GitHub project I plan to create a webpage for demonstrating the use of each algorithm.