I have heard the term, “cloud” used as a buzzword for many years now. I have never fully understood what a cloud is and how meteorology relates to technology and software engineering. So, I decided to stop wondering and start exploring. 

In this blog post I will give my explanation for what a cloud is and how is works in simple terms.  

TL;DR: The, “cloud” is a computer that someone else owns and you pay them to use it for your applications or services

A cloud is technology, or set of technologies, that allow for running and connecting various  web applications and services without having actual server hardware on-site at your business, home, etc.

Historically, individuals or business which wanted to host a web site or web application needed to invest in the computing hardware (I.e. server) to run their app or database and were fully responsible for managing the computing hardware. 

I have been exploring Microsoft’s cloud called Azure for deploying web apps and services. Thus far, I become familiar with a few of their services and plan to continue exploring. There are a multitude of services, both paid and free, which can be used for any type of application or service you want to develop. 


Thank you for reading my blog and keep learning!


Azure

Attending graduate school has been a personal goal of mine for many years. I elected to start working after graduation from my bachelor’s degree with the intention of returning to college after working in industry. The time has now come to return to academia to pursue a master’s degree in the 

school of computing from Clemson University

 starting Spring 2024. My goal is to further strengthen my software engineering skills, and learn about artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly for embedded and edge computing.

I am incredibly excited about this opportunity, and look forward to connecting with students and faculty at Clemson University! 

Graduate School

My work experience so far has been interesting, challenging, and rewarding. I have done physical labor jobs before college and mentally demanding jobs during and after college. I have learned to work hard and always be grateful for everything I have. 



My work experience starts when I was 12 years old. My dad taught my older brother and I how to work and raise a garden. We would then harvest and sell our produce at the local farmer’s market. Learning how to work hard, sell a product, and make money was rewarding and fun. 

Prior to starting college and until my junior year I worked for my uncle's lumber business. My primary responsibilities in the sawmill were to work on the 

 and operate the edge saw. The work was monotonous, manual labor but seeing a finished stack of lumber provided satisfaction. I learned how to work hard during my time at the sawmill and developed closer relationship with my family that owns the business.

EID Technical Intern, GE Power - Summer 2017

As an intern at GE Power in Greenville, South Carolina, I developed dashboards to visualize Industrial IoT data using GE Cimplicity HMI software. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is the language that controls the dashboards in Cimplicity. We discovered opportunities to save resources (electrical energy, process gasses, etc.) by identifying and fixing compressed air losses and excessive electricity usage in the facility using data we collected from the IIoT devices. 

My time at GE Power was incredibly enjoyable and I made several friends along the way. 

Engineering Intern, GE Aviation - 2017-2018

I interned at GE Aviation in Asheville, North Carolina during my Junior and Senior year of college. This position was focused on manufacturing so I developed Lean production lines and implemented 5S techniques in various parts of the shop to improve productivity. I worked with several other interns to perform time studies for multiple production lines to improve process efficiency. 

Working in a manufacturing environment was quite helpful and I learned about production, quality, and business aspects of manufacturing aircraft engine components. 

Mechatronics Engineer, Bosch Rexroth - 2018-2022

I worked as an engineer in the Mobile Hydraulics research and development  group. We focus on developing electro-hydraulic drive and control technology for mobile machines in the agriculture and construction industries. My specific department researched new hydraulic component and system designs. We also supported the other departments at our Fountain Inn facilities (three buildings in total). My major project was a new system for verification and validation of hydraulic components and systems. I developed and built a custom control and data system using NI LabVIEW and NI CompactRIO hardware. This project was great and enabled me to create something new and provide value to our R&D department. 

Control Systems/Software Engineer, Bosch Rexroth, 2022-present

I develop embedded control software for customer projects in North America in the off-highway industry.  More about this role to come later! 

My Work Experiences So Far

Python is a high level, object oriented programming language that has exploded in popularity. My experience with python started sometime around 2016 when I first heard about the language. 

One of the great things about Python is its versatility. The language is used in web application development, embedded software, data science, data visualization, and many other areas. I am currently learning Python and focusing on web app development using the Django framework. Django is a package that allows rapid development of full-stack web apps and APIs. 

! I will be adding applets to this Django application and will improve the styling and site navigation.

Python

The following blog post was created by Next.js. I am 

 the original author. I am sharing this information because it has helped me in my developer journey.

 (with and without data) whenever possible because your page can be built once and served by CDN, which makes it much faster than having a server render the page on every request.
You can use Static Generation for many types of pages, including:
- Marketing pages- Blog posts- E-commerce product listings- Help and documentation
You should ask yourself: "Can I pre-render this page 

 of a user's request?" If the answer is yes, then you should choose Static Generation.
On the other hand, Static Generation is 

 a good idea if you cannot pre-render a page ahead of a user's request. Maybe your page shows frequently updated data, and the page content changes on every request.
In that case, you can use 

. It will be slower, but the pre-rendered page will always be up-to-date. Or you can skip pre-rendering and use client-side JavaScript to populate data.

When to Use Static Generation v.s. Server-side Rendering

 it generates the HTML for a page.
- Static Generation is the pre-rendering method that generates the HTML at 

. The pre-rendered HTML is then _reused_ on each request.- Server-side Rendering is the pre-rendering method that generates the HTML on 

 which pre-rendering form to use for each page. You can create a "hybrid" Next.js app by using Static Generation for most pages and using Server-side Rendering for others.

Two Forms of Pre-rendering

This is the first post on my new blog. Check in regularly to see what I’m working on and follow my career as an engineer. 

Hello World

Welcome to my blog! I post about various engineering and computing topics as I continue learning and developing software engineering skills.