6 Months at Vail Systems

Feb 15, 2021 - 5 min to read

In June of 2020, I started as a full-time Web Software Engineer at Vail Systems. Here are highlights of what I’ve learned, and what I’ll be working on going forward. The plan is to do one of these a month as quick bullet points, starting in March.

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Ben Mitchinson

Focused on code quality, learning new things, and creating effective processes for agile development. I like to make software that feels fun to use.

Software Engineer @ Accenture Industry X

Denver, CO

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Mother's Day Photo Frame

May 14, 2017

This year for Mother’s Day, I decided to take an old digital photo frame we had lying around the house, and throw in some improvements. Originally, the frame had a small amount of internal memory, and could store low-resolution images loaded in from a flash drive. The process of moving files over was tedious, and I wanted anyone in my family to be able to easily contribute to the rotation of photos. Going away from school, I thought it would be neat to be able to easily update the frame with new photos, no matter where my siblings were in the world.

Bus Predictions with Alexa

Dec 2, 2017

During local hack day this December, I developed an Alexa skill for students to check bus times through campus transportation. It was a solo project I set out to complete in 10 hours, and as of January of 2019, over 30 students are still actively invoking the skill every week.

⚡ Laserphonic

May 2, 2018

For a course in Digital Arts this semester, two friends and I grouped together to create a multichannel audio circuit for displaying “Chladni Figures” in a project we called “Laserphonic”.

Chladni Plate (Geek.com)

You may have seen these formations on plates such as the one shown above. We set out to recreate the resonant frequency effects visually using lasers, as a way for listeners and artists to see a real-time visualization of harmony and dissonance. We were inspired by Nathan J. Wall, who demoed a similar idea for an acoustics project at USF Music Tech in 2012.

Entering Year 3 of Computer Comfort 👵💻

Jul 21, 2018

This fall I'll be taking on the role of President for the Computer Comfort executive board, and I couldn't be more excited. I've been with the org for two years now, and immediately after my first semester of volunteering, I applied for a position on the board. I knew right away that the club was something I wanted to participate in throughout my four years at Iowa, and I've held leadership roles within the club ever since. In that time we've grown a ton, so I wanted to share a bit about what we've done for the community, and how we've grown as a student org on campus.

Our Mission Statement:

> "Computer Comfort strives to bridge the age gap in Iowa City by educating seniors on today’s technology while building strong relationships in the process."

TigerHacks 2018: Playground News

Oct 3, 2018

At TigerHacks this year at the University of Missouri, Olivia Sandvold, Ben Weinberg and I, worked together to build “Playground News”: A web app for elementary/adolescent aged kids to read and interact with curated news, and motivate family conversation.

Our goal was to help kids increase their literary ability, learn relevant topics through current news, and then encourage dialog over those concepts with parents through provided parental controls and data-driven tooling with insight reports.