Hi I'm Paul aka fuzzyray

Career

I've been fascinated with computers and programming since I played my first video games on an apple ][ computer and started dabbling in BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer.

I went to college at The United States Military Academy (West Point) and received my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science in 1989.

While in the Army, I served in Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm but unfortunately damaged my right hip and was medically discharged in 1992.

I started my career in Telecommunications at MCI in 1994, working on Network Management Systems.

I went to work for Verizon Wireless in 2001 and held several positions until I voluntarily left in 2019 so I could get a hip replacement for my hip that had seriously degraded over the years since I first damaged it.

Highlights of my career at Verizon Wireless

• Fault Management System team lead and design architect
• Tier 3 Network Engineer for National Network Operations
• Network infrastructure automation lead for the Verizon Cloud Platform

I am currently a Lead Site Reliability Engineer with Sabre.

Hobbies and Interests

I love video games and computing. During my free time I play Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, and Crusader Kings 3 to name a few.

I actively look for and take online training to continue to hone my skills.

Fractint

My introduction to Open Source software was with Fractint. My PC had an 80286 Intel Processor with 1MB of extended memory. There were two additional types of additional memory at the time "expanded" and "extended". I had the extended type which had very little support for use other than as a RAM disk. I wrote and submitted a patch to add extended memory support to Fractint, so that I could use my additional memory with the software. The patch was accepted and is documented in the dos_help/help5.src file in the source code.

Gentoo Linux

I was on the Portage Tools team for Gentoo Linux from 2005 - 2018. I primarily focused on the Gentoolkit package.

I've been working through the freeCodeCamp Certification projects to refresh my skills.

Responsive Web Design

freeCodeCamp Tribute Page

freeCodeCamp Survey Page

freeCodeCamp Technical Documentation Page

freeCodeCamp Product Page

JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures

Project Viewer

Viewer written in React to view the projects for the Javascript Algorithms and Data Structures Certificate

Front End Libraries

freeCodeCamp Random Quote Machine

Written with React, Bootstrap, and FontAwesome
Source Code

freeCodeCamp Markdown Previewer

Written with React and Marked.js
Source Code

freeCodeCamp Drum Machine

Written with jQuery and Materialize
Source Code

freeCodeCamp Javascript Calculator

Written with React and Pure CSS Buttons
Source Code

freeCodeCamp Pomodoro Clock

Written with React and Pure CSS Buttons
Source Code

Data Visualization with D3

While working on these projects, I personally felt that while it is a very powerful and nice library, D3 is too low level to quickly create data visualizations.

I wrote d3-abstraction-classes.js to abstract the details of creating data visualizations for the projects.

Bar Chart

Scatter Plot

Heat Map

Choropleth Map

Treemap Diagram

APIs and Microservices

The API and Microservices projects were to build a backend to serve different APIs. All of the code is on GitHub and can be run using the Repl.it links.

Quality Assurance

The Quality Assurance projects were to continue to build backends to serve different APIs. However, the emphasis was on creating Unit and Functional tests to ensure the programs behaved as expected. All of the code is on GitHub and can be run using the Repl.it links.

Scientific Computing with Python

Scientific Computing with Python is freeCodeCamp's introductory course for Python. The projects were to build specific things to specification and pass the unit tests for the project. All of the code is on GitHub and can be run using the Repl.it links.

Data Analysis with Python

The Data Analysis course focused on using Numpy, Pandas, matplotlib and Seaborn to perform Data Analysis and Data Visualization. All of the code is on GitHub and can be run using the Repl.it links.

I've been taking the introductory courses in Data Science and Machine Learning offered by Aakash N S and Jovian.ai

Data Analysis with Python: Zero to Pandas

Course Project: An Exploratory Analysis of COVID-19 in Texas

Deep Learning with PyTorch: Zero to GANs

Course Project: Creating Images of Human Faces Using GANS