Sean Blonien

For Pariveda's first Hackathon for Social Good in 2020, my team of consultants and I built a mobile app to help addiction recovery. The app centers around a Phoenix, representing the recovering addicts, that levels up from doing trust building exercises, such as location check-ins. The Phoenix's team members and sponsors can use the app to track critical metrics such as biometric data, location, and journal entries. Made in collaboration with a mother who knows what it's like for a loved one to face addition, we used positive reinforcement and gamification as a mechanism to rebuild trust with those around the Phoenix. Since this was done in a short ~36 hour time period, the app was not fully functional when we ended, but the architecture was in place. We presented and demoed our solution to the whole firm at Finfest, and won Fin Favorite and Fimplementation awards for our project against 5 other teams. See the presentation for more.

For my computer science capstone competition in Spring 2020, my team of 5 others and I built Baylor's Capstone Content Management System v2.0, which we later named Archway. Picking up from previous semester's work, we built a web app that universities could use to manage, host, and showcase capstone projects accross the university. We focused on designing a centralized solution that could be used across all departments that was easy to manage for IT webmasters, professors, company sponsors, and students. In the end, we had configurable theming, dynamic page structure and content using an in-app Markdown/HTML editor, comprehensive capstone management, a sponsor project process, multiple roles and permissions, login with email confirmation, and administration panels with import, export, and backup functionality. We presented and demoed our solution to faculty and won first place in the competition against 4 other teams.

As a semester long group project for Software Engineering II in fall 2018, I lead my team as the project manager to make a full-stack web application. Our goal was to use new technologies in a team environment over multiple months while using best practices in the context of software engineering. With the help of Credera's mentorship and template project, we built a pet sitting service web application called Animalis. Users can register to find pet sitting services or to sit for other people's pets. Functionalities include managing pets, finding, posting, and managing sessions, receiving email and in-app notifications, rating users, social media integration, and lots of other features that you can browse yourself. Animalis demonstrates reactive and dynamic features that are common in today's single-page web applications. Because of weekly Scrum meetings and software engineering deliverables (i.e. use cases, domain model, etc.) in addition to the programming, this project has made me well versed in all related concepts of web applications, non-relational databases, agile methodologies, CI/CD, and software engineering practices. Screenshots, documentation, code, and guides can be found on Animalis' Gitlab.

At the Chillenium 2019 game jam at Texas A&M, my team and I made a co-op multiplayer puzzle game where two players work together as ants to help save the queen. The game jam theme was "All For One" which is why we choose to make a cooperative strategy game where the players work together for a common goal. We used the Unity game engine to quickly develop and prototype the game within a 48 hour period. We did not win any awards, but it was a great team experience centered around game development. You can play the game on the game's official submission page.

While serving as the Project Manager of Baylor's Virtual Reality Club, a team of club members and I, along with the Baylor Library System, worked to create a VR experience that showcased the expansive archive of the most at-risk pieces and ephemera from Baylor's Black Gospel Music Restoration Project in a permanent and interactive manner. The collection has various types of media formats from United States between the 1940's through the 1980's, all of which could be experienced within VR. The team was sponsored by the Oculus Start program which provided our developers with free Oculus equipment. There were plans to make this experience into a permanent feature at Baylor's Mayborn Museum, Moody Library on Baylor's campus, and potentially at the Smithsonian where the history project is already featured, but unfortunately, project development stopped after lack of interest in VR development and the COVID-19 pandemic. The project had working music records, art, and a southern Baptist church environment, but it was never completed. Source code, documentation, and assets are all available in the Github repo.

For my Software Engineering and Java courses' final project spring 2018, I made an Android app that tracked crypto asset prices using public price data from CoinMarketCap. The app has a login and registration system using Google Firebase so that it could eventually be expanded to save favorite assets, sync across devices, and store portfolio information, but that was never fully implemented. The user can easily see price and other detailed asset information such as price change, volume, market cap, and a brief description of the asset. The app was made using the software engineering best practices and methodology with accompanying documentation. Please view the documentation for more information.

For Hacklahoma 2018, my team C Bears and I created a website that visualized data provided by Vitech. The website uses Google Maps API to show aggregated data related to life insurance based on location and other factors. The map can be filtered such that users can choose only to see the "bear necessities." Additionally there are interactive charts such that user can visualize the data graphically. This was one of my first hackathons, so it was mostly a learning experience after all. Here's a link to our Devpost submission.

At the world's largest student-lead game jam competition, Chillenium 2017, I lead my team to create a sci-fi virtual reality game from scratch in 48 hours. With no prior experience in Unreal Engine 4, we managed to develop a fully playable game in which the player, Aries, must destroy ten ships on his planet by summoning meteors, casting lightning, or throwing boulders all within VR. Here's our submission page, and here's a news article that features my team and me as well as gives a brief overview of Chillenium.

Over the summer of 2017, my friend and I developed a fun Android/iOS video game loosely based on Klyde Warren Park's Guest Services position that we both were working for at the time. Using GameMaker 1.4, we made ten functional levels with original art, sound, and style. Similar to Diner Dash, the player performs small tasks to get points with increasing difficulty. It has become a side project of mine that I intend on adding to in my free time. Fun fact, I registered for a sole proprietorship under the assumed name "Doggo Studios" which is technically my first company.

For my Technology Seminar Capstone project in spring of 2016, I implemented multiple security trading algorithms in Quantopian, a Python based IDE, to predict market trends based on statistical and financial concepts from my research. With the ability to back-test my algorithms, I was able to test different strategies to see their effectiveness under different time periods and constraints. Here is the presentation I gave at the end of the project.

My friend and I engineered a "Smart Mirror" that used a Raspberry Pi computer to dynamically display personalized time, weather, schedule, and news while maintaining the reflective functionality of a mirror. We used the open-source JavaScript software MagicMirror along with the unix derivative Raspbian OS to customize the display. This rustic looking, hand crafted mirror is a great way for me to see news and my itinerary at quick glance.