joe sogard
Hi, I’m Joe.
I’m a recent graduate from Iowa State’s Software Engineering program always looking to sharpen my skills as a programmer. Currently I work at Innovative Software Engineering – a software contracting firm in Iowa – as a Software Engineer on a development team for the company’s largest product. My personal goal for the future is to move back to the Minneapolis area, where I'm originally from, and continue refining and growing my professional skills.
In college I had many internships and jobs relating to my major and enjoyed participating in many of my school’s clubs too. Throughout my time in college I was a head organizer of HackISU and Digital Women and a founder of Digital Women: Code Camp along with a competitor in many hackathons throughout the midwest.
In my free time I like to meet new people, spend time outdoors, knit, and work on personal programming projects. I’m always looking for ways to improve my programming skills and I’m especially interested in backend and full-stack development, I’d love to get better at front-end UI/UX design, and I’m also a fan of mobile development.
Raspberry Pi Music Video Frame
One of my favorite forms of art is music videos. When done right, the video and the song itself improve each other. That's why I started this project so I could watch them and show them to friends by simply plugging the Raspberry Pi in.
The final form of this project will be a monitor that I mount on a wall which plays all of my favorite music videos. The attached Raspberry Pi, in addition to playing and storing the videos, hosts a web-app from which I can control the videos being played and upload more that I find. After starting work on it using PHP and the linux command line, I've decided to no longer torture myself and now I use the python framework, Django.
Whiteboard With Friends
Whiteboard With Firends is a web app I started development on with my roommate at the time when I was first learning web development. This is a social networking site in which users create their own "whiteboards" where friends of theirs can draw on them and collaborate in making art with each other.
We started this as a school project using AngularJS and a PHP backend but once the class was over the school-provided servers were wiped clean. After learning a bit more about full stack development, I resurrected it and have been working alone on it, using python Flaskr framework in collaboration with Heroku for deployment purposes in a new repo:
Whiteboard With Friends 2
.
Personal/Professional Website
In order to show off my incredible web development skills, my side projects, and me to friends and employers alike, I needed a website.
In order to improve my UI skills I made this site entirely from scratch without any templates or frameworks, jsut pure HTML, CSS, and jQuery. Since jsut a normal website was too simple, I then made a rotating collage of pictures of me and my friends and family to show off my personality and what's important to me.
Meal Management App
During my Senior year of college I started my first ever mobile development class. At the same time I had to start the first semester of school in which I had absolutely no meal plan. After a few poorly planned grocery trips I was inspired to make an app to track how much I was spending on my food and how much I was spending on each meal. Instead of just downloading some ad-ridden app off the app store, I took this as a challenge to make my first ever mobile app.
