Family Fun Day

Wonderful Wifey

The Man, The Myth, The Legend

I created this site as a place to practice my skills, test new technologies, and demonstrate my abilities. It is hosted with AWS Amplify. It utilizes the React MaterialUI library for the front end and Flask for the chore tracker (coming soon) backend. For the Titanic visualization backend it uses an AWS Lambda function that is triggered by AWS API Gateway. For persistent storage it uses an AWS PostgreSQL database. I manage the DNS myself through GoDaddy. Before migrating to Amplify the front end was hosted in an AWS EC2 instance with an Nginx reverse proxy server to serve static content. I previously had an email server set up in the same instance using Postfix, Dovecot and SOGo. It was fun setting the email server up but, due to the cost of running an extra EC2 instance and the headache of self managing an email server, I decided to shut that instance down.

Hello, my name is Frank Conlon. I am a Full stack Software Engineer with experience in a variety of tech stacks. Most recently I have been working with React/Django, but I also have experience with J2EE, Springboot and Flask. I am familiar with and proficient at coding in a variety of languages including C/C++, Java, Python, Javascript, and Typescript. My biggest strength though is my ability to research problems and develop effective solutions with little or no guidance. I'm not necessarily the guy that already knows the solution, but I am always able to find or create the solution.

At home I am a father to three children and husband to my wife Chrystal. My youngest is seven years old and my oldest two are 14. I'm fortunate to have not one, but TWO teenagers who still know everthing 😂. In my free time I like to play video games and watch various tv shows with my wife. She has a bit of a soft spot for reality TV and true crime stories. We have three dogs, Nacho, Jiraya and Raider, who like to beg for pets and steal food 😋. We love them to death though and wouldn't trade them for anything.

At TEKSystems I served as a consultant for Bank of America in a React/Django tech stack with an Oracle database for persisting data. I primarily worked on the backend apis, but I also code reviewed all front end code and helped to make architectural decisions to improve performance. I was heavily involed in requirements elicitation and assisted in the desgin of the dataflow for both the front and backend applications. I redesigned the APIs and front end calls to eliminate timeouts that were occuring due to poor data retrieval design. I also assisted with database design decisions that were instrumental in ensuring that customer expectations were met.

At Briebug I served as a consultant for FedEx in an Angular/Springboot tech stack with an Oracle database for persisting data. When I first started working there I was handed 15 interdepent repositories for an application and told, "The guy who wrote these isn't avaialbe anymore and we don't know how they work. Have fun." 😂. I had to reverse engineer the code to figure out how it worked so I could improve and maintain it for the company. Aside from that, FedEx also did not have well developed agile processes on the team that I was assigned to, so I helped to implement new SAFe (they were already using SAFe, just not very well) agile processes to improve the developer experience.

At USAA I worked as a full stack developer in a tech stack that used React/Redux and J2EE with an IBM DB2 mainframe for out database. We mostly use RESTful apis for our backend, but we did have a few legacy APIs that used SOAP. Here we used Elastic Search and splunk for parsing logs, and I had to set up automated alerts from Elastic Search to let us know when our endpoints were failing. We used the Scaled Agile Framework for enterprises (SAFe) methodology for all of our agile procedures.

I fulfilled several roles in my time at Texas Tech including Tutor, TA, Graduate Assistant, IT Support, and Full Time Instructor.

Instructor

As an instructor I taught between 3 and 4 classes each semester with anyhere from 250 to 350 students. I taught virtually every CS class under the sun. If none of the tenured professors wanted to teach a class I was the one that ended up teaching it. As a result I taught Programming Principles I/II (python and c respectively), Data Structures, Assembly Language, Computer Architecture, Software Engineering, and Logic Programming. I was responsible for developing the curriculum, tests, and assigments as well as grading everything that was assigned.

Teaching Assistant

As a teaching assistant I was essentially a full time instructor for a Python lab. I had to create assignments and lesson plans each week and grade them, as well as provided individual and group instruction on Python Programming Principles during each weekly lab.

Graduate Assistant

As a graduate assistant my primary responsibility was to resarch ways to better parallelize the pmap utility that genetics researchers use to perform string matching on massive (more than 3 billion charaters for the human genome) strings. The pmap utility used a shared memory model (threads) and we were trying to parallelize it for a distrubuted memory model.

IT Support

As an IT support specialist I provided IT support for anyone who used any of the super computers at the TTU High Performance Computing Center. I also helped to maintain the TTUHPC website and participated in the Construction of the Quanah super computer.

Tutor

As a tutor I worked in the Learning Center where students could come for free tutoring in any subject the university offered. I personally tutored math classes from basic Algebra up to Calculus 3, Linear Algebra, Statistics, all Computer Science courses and Matlab. I was the only Matlab tutor the Learning Center had. Even though I never had any formal training in Matlab, I was able to pick it up on the fly and tutor it for several different engineering courses, including a graduate engineering course while I was an undergrad.

I interned for two summers at Texas Intstruments as an undergraduate student, and for two more summers at Sandia National Labs as a graduate student. Both internships provided me with unique perspectives and challenges.

Sandia National Labs

I spent two summers at SNL working in their Center for Cyber defenders program. My first summer I worked on a project to test the feasibility of using bluetooth to transmit messages across a city in the event of a natural disaster that knocked out cell phone towers. In my second summer I worked on a project where I used conditional probably to detect malicious instructions being sent to Industrial Control Systems (the systems that operate infrastructure such as power grids and traffic lights). As a side procject I also wrote a small program for an SPI board that was used to detect temperatures (I wasn't told what it was measuring temperatures for).

Texas Instruments

At Texas Instruments I helped automate the processes that create the integrated circuits in their fabrication facilites. I had the opportunity to go inside two of their fabs and see how the processes work. The section that I worked in at TI used a propietary language based on shell scripting that was adapted for the unique challenges of semiconductor automation. During my second summer I was given a manual for a brand new tool that they had just bought (which had never been automated anywhere in the world before) and completely automated it from start to finish. In fairness, the tool was a fairly simple 'oven', but I still like to imagine the EE's after I left saying "The intern did it in 3 months. What's taking you guys so long?" 😋.

The Army is where I learned how to persevere in the face of adversity and refined my leadership style. As an Ammunition Specialist I was responsible for the care, storage, and maintenance of all of the ammunition in an ammunition supply point. As a Sergeant I was responsible for the development and training of all of my subordinates. My experiences as a leader in the Army reinforced my leadership style. I found that the best way to lead, even when you DO have the authority punish people, is still to make sure that your subordinates are taken care of. You take care of them and they will take care of you.