Cinderella’s Closet Application

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

Starting unofficially in June of 2021, I have been working with a local non-profit called Cinderella’s Closet to build an application to help them track event scheduling and inventory management. Cinderella’s Closet Cincinnati is a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, Ohio that works with junior and senior high school girls (or princesses) who are unable to attend their high school prom because they need a dress, shoes, and other items. Cinderella’s Closet encourages high school girls to recognize their beauty and value by providing a unique prom shopping experience.

Due to the amount of work this project entails, I formed a team with Ben Romig and Trent McGinnis and we registered the idea as our senior capstone project with the university. The university assigned Dyllon Dekok to be our faculty advisor for the project. This project exceeds the expectations of our senior capstone requirement because we set our own timeline to have the application completed by the beginning of February 2022 so that Cinderella’s Closet could use it for the 2022 prom shopping season.

With much effort and an early start, the team was able to deliver the event scheduling features by the February deadline and then added inventory management in a subsequent release in early March. However, the project is far from over and we are planning to continue maintaining the project and adding new features past graduation.

Throughout the experience, I served as the project manager and our liaison to Cinderella’s Closet. This means I’ve been responsible for keeping the client informed our our progress, receiving and processing bug reports and feature requests, and keeping our task board up to date and in priority order. Early on I made the mistake of putting tasks on the board that were far too broad and it caused tasks to take a very long time and created many blocking tasks. As the project progressed, I learned how to break larger pieces down into more manageable tasks so that they could be completed within the boundary of our two-week sprints.

Our GitHub Project Board as of 04/05/2022

Click here to view our presentation on the ITEXPO Website

Click here to view our final report published in the UC library (coming soon)

Click here to view the documents written during the experience

Robotics Mentorship (2022 Season)

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

This season was a tough one for our team. Due to COVID-19, FIRST chose not to hold a normal competition season in 2021 which means that most of our current students have never experiences a full build season and constructed/coded a robot from start to finish. Because of this, we spent a lot of extra time training this year. We also ended up behind on the construction of the robot causing the controls team to do most of their testing throughout our first competition of the season.

In spite of the challenges, the team has had lots of fun this season collaborating on the robot and interacting with the other teams at competition. We’ve learned a lot as a team and are ready to go into our second competition this weekend with lots of improvements to our robot and regardless of how we do, I am confident we’ll have fun. There’s no place like a FIRST Robotics Competition!

Click here to view the reflections written during the experience

Click here to view the code for our 2022 robot: Bobarazzi

Robotics Mentoring Reflection 1/1/22

Wesley Reed | Robotics Reflections 2022

Since starting in December, I have worked toward my initial goal of setting up a central login server for Lakota Robotics and connecting all of the existing computers to it. I also have set up several new computers that were purchased during this time and created login accounts for all of the students on the team. As this goal is now complete, further reflections will switch to the goal of mentoring the controls team students through the build and competition season.

  1. Are all of the students involved?

While not all of the students were involved in the server project, they all have been working consistently during meetings

  1. What can I do to make sure all of the students are involved?

One thing I plan to start is bringing one of the students to sit with me each time I make changes to the server so they can start learning how it works

  1. How is the team progressing toward their goals?

Training season is a bit rough this year since this will be the first time in 2 years the team has built a full robot due to COVID-19, and a majority of our students have never seen a full robot build

  1. What am I doing to help the team toward their goals?

I am helping to train the controls students so they hopefully are ready to begin programming the robot next week

A Year in Review 2020-21

Wesley Reed | Year-In-Review

What specific experiences in the past year have had the most impact on your personal and professional trajectory?

The biggest experience I have had in the last year has been working at the UC IT Solutions Center (ITSC). They have been gracious enough to bring me on as a graduate assistant to help with my tuition costs, and I continue to learn more there than in my classes.

I am now the lead developer on multiple projects, as well as being in charge of server maintenance and administration, development operations, office administration, and some client relations.

As I mentioned last year, now that I have become a project lead at ITSC part of my responsibilities are to delegate tasks to the other people on the project and trust that they will get the job done. I continue to struggle with delegation because I like to own what I’m delivering and see to it personally. Every time I delegate a task, part of me worries that it might not get done, it might not get done to the level of quality that I hold myself to, or it might take longer than if I were to do it and in many cases it does take longer. I’ve been working a lot with my supervisor to overcome this, and know how to delegate and hold others accountable for their work.

Due to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), I was forced to work from home for a significant portion of the year. This experience was very interesting, however at the end of it I was very ready to return to the office. Moving forward, I don’t think I would want to work from home for extended periods of time because my brain needs the physical separation of work and home so that it can stop working when work is over. Throughout this season I found myself continuing to work late into the evening or thinking about work while I was doing other things. I also enjoy the environment of being in an office and interacting with my coworkers.

Articulate specific personal and/or professional goals for the next year.

In the next year I hope to:

  • Complete senior design and deliver a high quality application to our client
  • Have fun with the UC band
  • Graduate with my bachelors and masters degree

Robotics Mentorship (2020 Season)

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

This year, I decided to return to my high school robotics team as a mentor so I could help give back to the team. I had an amazing experience with the team when I was a student, and I wanted to make sure that others could have that same opportunity.

At the beginning of this season, our mentor Paul George passed away after a long battle with cancer, which was very hard on our team. Paul was affectionately referred to by the team as “Dad” and we call our other team leader Jimmy, “Mom” because of how they interacted together and because we consider the whole team to be a family. In his memory, we named this year’s robot after him.

On top of this, our season was cut short by COVID-19 and we only got to compete at one event. We did very well at the event and even won an award for having the most aesthetically pleasing robot! I also had lots of fun being a referee for the matches, making sure every match was fair and properly scored.

Despite the season being cut short, we were still able to use our resources and knowledge to impact our community. The team tasked our 3D printers to turn out mask “Ear Savers” for the teachers in our school district, which got featured on the local news!

We were also able to participate in the AndyMark Robot Fight Night where students make robots out of cardboard and plastic to fight in a friendly competition. While fighting isn’t directly in the mission of FIRST robotics, this event is very well put together and everyone still feels the values of FIRST throughout the competition.

Click here to view the reflections written during the experience

Click here to view the code for our 2020 robot: Bampás

A Year in Review 2019-20

Wesley Reed | Year-In-Review

What specific experiences in the past year have had the most impact on your personal and professional trajectory?

The biggest experience I have had in the last year has been working at the UC IT Solutions Center (ITSC). They have been gracious enough to keep me on for the last 3 semesters, and I continue to learn more there than in my classes. Since I am now one of the more senior developers at ITSC, I continue to be given more and more responsibility. In addition to being the lead developer on my original project, my responsibilities now include server maintenance and administration, development operations, office administrator, client relations, and I have designed several proof-of-concept applications for potential clients.

Now that I have become a project lead at ITSC, part of my responsibilities are to delegate tasks to the other people on the project and trust that they will get the job done. Learning to delegate tasks has been a struggle for me this year, because I like to own what I’m delivering and see to it personally. Every time I delegate a task, part of me worries that it might not get done, it might not get done to the level of quality that I hold myself to, or it might take longer than if I were to do it. I’ve been working a lot with my supervisor to overcome this, and know how to delegate and hold others accountable for their work.

This year, I worked with my high school robotics team as a mentor. Although it was cut short due to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), we had a lot of fun this season. It was really cool being on the montor side and being able to guid the next generation of robotics students. Instead of stressing constantly about getting the code perfect for the robot, I was able to sit back and look at all of the different projects going on during the build season and offer my help in several different areas (including the code). I definitely learned a lot about being a leader from this experience, and I was able to do several side projects that helped me learn about maintaining a Windows Active Directory server, creating printed circuit boards, soldering surface chips, and much more.

Articulate specific personal and/or professional goals for the next year.

In the next year I hope to:

  • Make some new friends of campus
  • Complete the current version of the client application at work and plan the next version
  • Have fun with the UC band
  • Take on the challenge of my MSIT courses

Robotics Mentoring Reflection 4/20/20

Wesley Reed | Robotics Reflections 2020

In the time since my last reflection, a lot has drastically changed. Due to COVID-19, FIRST has suspended all events and cancelled the 2020 championship which has derailed our group. We were one of the teams lucky enough to compete in a week 1 event. At that event, we placed rather poorly but has the highest accuracy rate of scoring a power cell into the inner goal (which is the hardest one to score into). Our team has coined this the “Woo-hoo rate” and it’s awesome to be able to say we had the best Woo-hoo rate of the 60+ robots at the event.

After the event, we started making to robot better, focusing on making the shooter more versatile, the power cell storage faster, and adding the endgame mechanism to the robot. Unfortunately with the season being postponed/cancelled, we won’t be able to complete the robot until our team leader determines it is safe to return to the robotics house. Luckily, there are many off-season competitions that we will hopefully be able to attend so we do plan to return and finish the robot. Even if we don’t get to compete again, it just wouldn’t feel right leaving a robot unfinished.

Despite the distance, our team is working hard to stay engaged and keep working. We are currently designing a robot out of cardboard to participate in the AndyMark Robot Fight Night using a cloud-based CAD software called OnShape, and we already have at least one design we hope to compete with.

Questions to think about:

  1. Are all of the students involved?

Under the circumstances, I believe that as many students are involved as are able, and want to. Due to the unusual circumstances this is a really hard question to answer.

  1. What can I do to make sure all of the students are involved?

Again, a hard question to answer due to COVID-19, however I do have some coding projects that I can set up to help keep the controls kids engaged.

  1. How is the team progressing toward their goals?

We don’t have any clear goals at the moment other than the CAD design for the Fight Night robot, and in that respect we are progressing well.

  1. What am I doing to help the team toward their goals?

I haven’t been able to help with the CAD design, but right now every hand is on that so they don’t really need my help with it. I can help controls by adding those projects I talked about above.

IT Accelerated Program, 2019 Study Tour

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

This past December, I was offered a great opportunity to travel to San Francisco, California to visit with several companies. We visited Macy’s Technology, Cisco, Intuit, Google, Splunk and Trōv. Of all of the companies we visited, I enjoyed Cisco and Google the most. What really set Cisco and Google apart was they seemed less interested in marketing their company to us and getting us to come work for them, and more interested in developing us as professionals.

At Cisco, we had a panel discussion with several recent hires and speed mentoring sessions with four different individuals who have been at Cisco for many years. Throughout these discussions we talked a lot about what it’s like to apply for a job, how to impress a recruiter, how to make sure you represent your personal brand in the best way possible, talked about some tips for performing in your job after you’re hired. These discussions were very informative and answered a lot of questions I had about what comes next after college, and some I didn’t even know I had. That being said, I do wish there would have been a little bit of “here’s why you should come work at Cisco” in the conversation.

At Google, we did talk a little about the programs Google offers for their employees, but most memorable part of the experience was when one of the people hosting us took us through several mock interview questions to help prepare us for future interviews with any company. Google struck a nice balance of “here’s why you should come work at Google” and giving us tips on how to interview even if we don’t choose to apply to Google.

Intuit’s presentation was very focused on what Intuit does as a company, and what benefits they offer to their employees. It was really cool to see all of the things that they are working on and to hear what they value as a company. They spoke a lot about work/life balance and how the company values the time employees spend outside of work, both recreationally and helping the community. Like Google and Cisco, it was great to hear that they value us as individuals and want to make sure we are growing professionally.

Both Macy’s Technology and Splunk seemed a little unprepared to host us. Macy’s Technology had a recruiter speak to us for about 20 minutes, walked us around their rooftop space and one floor of the building, then sent us on our way. Overall, not a very impressive experience. Similarly, Splunk gave us a short walk about a floor of the building and let us have a panel discussion with a few employees who didn’t have any talking points prepared and seemed surprised when we didn’t really know how to get the conversation started.

The last company we visited, Trōv, was very unique because it is a small startup company. Our host there talked about what it is the company does, and how they are utilizing modern technology such as Azure DevOps to enhance their product and delivery of their product. It was very cool to see how tools we are learning about in our classes are being applied in the real world. We also got to speak with the CEO of Trōv about being an entrepreneur and coming up with an idea, then making that idea a reality and marketing it.

In addition to visiting the companies, we also had lots of time to explore the bay area and visit tourist attractions such as the Computer History Museum, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Muir Woods, the Intuit Museum, the San Francisco Cable Car Museum, and many other places.

View my notes from the companies here

Robotics Mentoring Reflection 2/2/20

Wesley Reed | Robotics Reflections 2020

Over the last month I have been working with a group of students on the Lakota Robotics Team (FRC Team 1038) to code a robot to compete in the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition, Infinite Recharge. I feel like I should be doing these reflections more often, however not a lot has been going on for the students I am leading. Currently the team is experiencing issues with attendance on the mechanical team and it is making the mechanical design and construction of the robot progress slower than usual. This is causing the controls team to have little to no work to do and limiting my usefulness on the coding front.

Questions to think about:

  1. Are all of the students involved?

The students that are attending the meetings are involved for the most part. I do see some kids sitting around waiting for work to do, and the controls kids are often sitting around doing nothing for the reasons mentioned above.

  1. What can I do to make sure all of the students are involved?

I could start giving the controls kids practice exercises to work on when they aren’t busy so that they might learn more from their experience on the team.

  1. How is the team progressing toward their goals?

The team is progressing very slowly toward their goals because of a lack of manpower. The competition is fast approaching and tensions are running a little high as the robot design isn’t finalized yet.

  1. What am I doing to help the team toward their goals?

I’m currently helping out any way I can to try and get the team back on track but unfortunately, I do not have much mechanical background so I can’t be super helpful.

  1. What can I do to be a more effective leader? What ideas can I bring to the team to help them further their goals?

One of the things I have been thinking about is ways to help the team grow. Usually, we have a lot of people who come early in the year and then after a few weeks the number of people drops significantly. I’ve thought of surveying the people as to why they do or don’t come to the meetings to try and see how we can retain more people.

A Year In Review 2018-19

Wesley Reed | Year-In-Review

What specific experiences in the past year have had the most impact on your personal and professional trajectory?

The biggest experience I have had in the last year has been working at the UC IT Solutions Center (ITSC). I was fortunate to be one of ten incoming students to be offered a developer position at the Solutions Center in the fall. I continued part time in the spring and was offered a Co-Op there for this summer. I have learned more in my time there than in my classes this first year, both academically and professionally. Coming into the position I had no experience with the coding language or frameworks used in the applications developed by ITSC. In the fall, my boss helped push me to self-teach myself JavaScript, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and several other libraries that are needed to work on the applications with very limited help from my co-workers. The whole process took me most of the semester, but I learned a very valuable lesson on how to push through and understand new and difficult material and I believe in the future I will be able to teach myself new coding techniques in less time because of this experience.

Also, through my work at the ITSC, I have been given significant exposure to the client relations side of developing an application. In addition to developing, I am responsible for progress updates, application deployments (which are either in-person or via WebEx), answering client questions, defining new features, and several other things that require client interaction. With the help of my bosses, I have learned a lot about crafting professional emails and how much information to share with the client at a time. Too much information, and you run the risk of the client skipping over something important or confusing different points. In the future my experience interacting with clients will make me more marketable to employers, since most developers do not have client relations experience.

Finally, my time with the UC band has taught me a lot about enjoying life. At my high school, band was a highly competitive activity at every level. In marching band, we competed against other marching bands for trophies and bragging rights. In concert and jazz band, we competed against other members of our instrument section for first chair, as well as the OMEA (Ohio Music Education Association) “standards” to achieve a superior rating at contest. Here at UC, the band is a lot more focused on enjoying the activity than being the best. There is still some light competition for chair placement and to be better than the band that came before us, but the atmosphere is significantly more laid back that what I’m used to from high school. At first, this frustrated me because I was used to always being pushed for excellence and felt like the extra space in rehearsals was getting in the way of that. Over time, however, I have learned that band is not just about being the best, but about making friends and enjoying the music. And even though the UC directors aren’t pushing us as hard as my high school directors, as we like to say in the band, The UC Band is Damn Good (TUCBIDG).

Articulate specific personal and/or professional goals for the next year.

In the next year I hope to:

  • Make some new friends of campus
  • Eat healthier
  • Complete the current version of the client application at work and plan the next version
  • Have fun with the UC band
  • Take more challenging classes