Jacob McLemore

Working at PolySign has been the experience that helped me grow most as an engineer. My day-to-day work involved implementing features, fixing bugs, and helping design new pieces of a microservice architected Python backend. Beyond that, I learned how to be adaptable, how to lead software projects, and how to colloborate within a growing and dynamic organization.

In my time at Armored Things, I helped create and maintain back-end crowd-intelligence software in both Scala and Python. This included integrations with customers' already existing data sources (i.e. event scheduling software) and development of new services. Armored Things was my first professional experience as a software engineer and getting to work with and learn from the team I was a part of was amazing.

SmartRIA was my first internship where I helped maintain a large piece of software that I wasn't familiar with in a language that I wasn't familiar with. I picked up enough Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework in my first few weeks to be able to do my work of maintaining SmartRIA's server and client-side code effectively. SmartRIA was also the first place where I was exposed to an agile workflow in practice. I got the chance to participate in stand-ups with both the business and development teams to find development priorities for the week, learned how to rank and prioritize work, and how to communicate during an agile workflow.

Being a TA has been my most rewarding job so far. Getting the chance to work with students directly during their time in a class helped me learn a lot of things with the most important being how to coach someone to approach and solve a problem. As a TA, I couldn't just give the answers away and instead had to guide students to them. I did this by delivering short-form lectures, conducting live programming excercises, researching and using small-group discussion tactics, and giving students detailed feedback on their graded assignments.

As mentioned above, I really enjoy video game speedrunning. In January of 2019, I got the chance to use that enjoyment for a good cause by volunteering at Games Done Quick which is a biannual video game speedrunning charity marathon. I got to assist in raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation by working with a team of stage techs, producers, and audio engineers to keep the event's live stream running smoothly. I'm hoping to be able to volunteer at another Games Done Quick event in the future due to the great fun that I had and the great cause that I got to support.

While in college, I took up freelance web development both as a way to make money and to practice the skills that I was learning in college. My time working with a small business known as Dyslexia Tech on a progressive web app that allowed students with Dyslexia to take tests audibly was my absolute favorite project I got to work on during this time due to both the lead role I took on it and the cause that it served. I took a key role in technical planning, actual hands-on development, and project management for myself and 2 other developers that I worked with on the project. When it came time for me to hand over the project to another developer, I made sure that there was sufficient documentation in the project to assist its future developers in working with it.

Tutoring was my first job in college and the first that led me to a true love of learning and teaching others. With some hard work (and a little luck), I applied for and was selected to be a tutor during the 2nd semester of my freshmen year at the University of Tennessee. I had the opportunity to recieve training in 1-on-1 teaching techniques and got to apply that training by tutoring students in numerous computer science courses at UTK. I helped students learn best practices for C and C++ development through both code-review style feedback of their own code and by showing them example code and problems of my own creation. In addition, I helped students streamline their development workflows by both suggesting and demonstrating tools that are essential to being a successful programmer (i.e. debuggers and profilers).

My experience in the Virtual Enterprises International (VEI) program earns a spot on this site due to it being the starting point for my love of computer programming. As part of the VEI program, fellow students and I got the chance to run a virtual startup from the ground-up while still in high school. I had the opportunity to learn real leadership skills by leading a small team (5) of designers and other employees that helped design and implement the "company’s" technical projects. This included an e-commerce website and a native mobile app for Android smart phones.