Resume

CODING

Benchmarking

I wanted to learn how to create an actual SQL database from scratch and integrate it into my python scripts. I came up with the idea of comparing oil company stock prices through the coronavirus. Since there is an overprint of commodity price on the stocks, I had to benchmark their performance as a percentage stock price change over a given period of time. Originally, I was going to webscrape the oil prices, but I found some APIs that did the job much easier. I feed these into an SQL database that I created. This is obviously not the most efficient or intelligent way of doing this, but as I mentioned, I wanted the learning experience. My python code feeds commands to the SQL server and does some basic math amongst the tables. It then spits the results out and plots them using matplotlib. Code can be found at mygithub.

OreGrader

Over Christmas break 2018, I spent some time creating an application that would composite drillhole data for a specified cut off grade. For non-mining people, the process determines where in your drillholes have enough ore to be considered a resource. Usually it's a painstaking process to filter down your data make sure you're not dilluting your 3D modeled shape's grade, but this makes it much easier. Coding this involved a lot of for-loops, and I've not completely knocked out the bugs. Maybe I'll fix those next Christmas break! You can find the application at:www.oregrader.com.

This Website

I started this project to showcase some of my work, and to get a better understanding of front-end development. There are way easier ways to make websites, but I found thiswebseries by DevTips on YouTubeand thought it would be more educational. Travis has the perfect personality for teaching, and I highly recommend the series to anyone interested in learning introductory website design. I've deviated from his page a bit and took ideas from some of his other web series (I really love the parallax effect). However, I've found that it's a lot more fun to build the framework and code than it is to fill in the paragraphs with information about myself. So until I get around to it, please enjoy the placeholder picture of my beautiful dog, Olive.

GeoStriker

Excel has always been my cup of tea, but I wanted to try out actual programming. It was hard to find the time to dedicate to learning Python when I could easily complete the same task way faster elsewhere. In my spare time, I chose to set off on a project from my graduate studies, the GeoStriker. Geologists are taught how to complete 'three point problems' in undergrad. Given three points, we have to calculate the strike and dip of the plane that connects them. However, in the real world we collect more than three points. In my case, I had hundreds of XYZ pairs from an exported fault that I had interpreted in 3D software. How do you reconcile more than three points? That's where the GeoStriker comes in. It's a nifty calculator that determines the best-fit plane to a point cloud, and then gets the strike and dip of that plane.

GeoStriker, originally called XYZ to SD calculator, has been through MANY iterations. It started as an Excel sheet and took me months to get into a working calculator with the help of my friend Matthew Lenz. Just getting the code to calculate it was the first step though. Building an interface so that the app was accessable to anyone was the most difficult part. Eventually I got it hosted on a free website, of which I don't even remember the name. A year later, that website decided to get rid of their free service. Luckily, by this time I had already started another project and knew a little bit about web hosting and design. It still took me a while to figure out how to host it for free on Google's cloud services. While making that transition, I gave the website a much needed makeover. You can find the app here:www.geostriker.com.

ArcGIS

While at LandWorks, there were a lot of repetitive menus and searching that wasted the mapper's time. I saw the opportunity to make our lives easier by creating some navigational add ins to ArcGIS. The interface helps the user quickly navigate to the township/range, agreement, or town that they're supposed to locate. The project manager estimated that it would save about $75k over the life of the project. All I can say is that it definitely saved my wrist from so much repetitive movement.