2013

2016

2017

2018

2019

Beginning at St. Lawrence University
First Software Development Experiences
Starting my Professional Career
Building a Software Ecosystem
Moving my Software Ecosystem onto the Cloud

My time at St. Lawrence University began in the fall of 2013. When I first arrived, I wasn't sure what I wanted to study. Luckily, St. Lawrence University is a liberal arts college that encourages students to explore different subject areas before picking a major. I decided to try CS101: Intro to Computer Science during my first semester. At first I only enjoyed CS101 because there were no essays, and I really hated writing (which is funny considering I now write software development articles every week). By the end of the semester I really enjoyed the challenge of writing code. The class taught me basic imperative programming concepts in Python.

After CS101 I decided to continue taking computer science classes. I took one computer science class per semester for my first two years of college. At the end of my Sophomore year I declared as a computer science major and started taking multiple programming classes each semester. However, I still didn't research computer science or programming outside of class assignments. That changed my Junior spring.

During my Junior spring I decided to take my computer science research more seriously. I researched different software development concepts in my free time each day. Eventually I began building my own software.

I attribute a lot of my working habits to my time running Cross Country and Track & Field in college. Being a three season athlete who ran 70+ miles a week taught me the value of hard work and dedication.

The summer before my Senior year I began my software development career with an internship at Gartner in Stamford, Connecticut. I worked on two different Java web applications that summer, one that used the Spring MVC framework.

After my internship I was dedicated to working on software development projects. I created a website for my Cross Country and Track & Field teams where the athletes could log their workouts. I released the first version of SaintsXCTF.com in December. SaintsXCTF follows the LAMP stack and was the first website I built from scratch.

In my final semester at St. Lawrence University I added more features to SaintsXCTF.com and created an associated Android app written in Java. In the fall I completed the SaintsXCTF ecosystem by building an iOS app in Swift.

After graduating I worked full time at Gartner. I participated in a rotational program where I worked for a different team every six months, gaining exposure to different enterprise applications. I also learned how different teams operate in a corporate setting. My first rotation was full-stack development for an application using AngularJS, Java, Spring, and Oracle.

During the last few months of the year I began preparation work for my personal website. I learned advanced JavaScript features and began writing software development articles.

In 2018 I spent time with two different teams at Gartner. On the first team I developed features for a Java application that passed messages with RabbitMQ. On the second team I created a Jenkins pipeline that automated database script deployments for the entire company.

In my free time I continued my personal website preparation. I learned Angular, React, Webpack, Sass, and how to build MEAN and MERN stack applications. Along the way I wrote software development articles documenting my progress.

In the summer I released my personal website jarombek.com which follows the MERN stack. My personal website also uses AWS Lambda functions, AWS API Gateway, a Node.js command line application, and Terraform.

In 2019 I also worked for two different teams at Gartner. On the first team I wrote Continuous Integration Jenkins jobs and transitioned the teams application model from a monolithic app to microservices. I created a Jenkins job which deployed microservices to EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service). I provided each microservice with Kubernetes configuration. After graduating from Gartner's IT rotational program, I switched to my second team. On the second team I developed new features for PeerInsights, a public facing website that provides peer reviews on technology products. It uses Oracle, Elasticsearch, Java (Spring), React.js, and Sass for its technology stack.

In my free time I improved the infrastructure of my first website SaintsXCTF.com. I moved it onto AWS and wrote the entire infrastructure as code with Terraform. I also wrote Terraform IaC for my personal website jarombek.com and changed the website infrastructure from a virtual machine to containers. I also focused on creating unit tests in Python for all my infrastructure. Additionally my AWS Infrastructure has its own Jenkins server for automating tasks.

Currently I'm developing more features for my personal website, working on version II of my SaintsXCTF website, and trying to write one software development article per week. I'm continuing to build my personal brand and document all my knowledge and hard work.

Languages: Java, Python, SQL, C, Assembly

Technologies: PostgreSQL

Languages: Java, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, HTML

Technologies: Spring, Android, JQuery, MySQL

Languages: Java, Swift, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, HTML

Technologies: Android, iOS, AngularJS, Spring, JQuery, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle

Languages: JavaScript, Java, TypeScript, Groovy, Sass, Haskell, HTML

Technologies: React, Angular, Webpack, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Oracle, MySQL, Jenkins, Terraform, AWS

Languages: Python, JavaScript, Java, Sass, HCL, C#, HTML

Technologies: React, Jenkins, Terraform, CloudFormation