Introductory Portrait

Good day, sir or madam:

My name is Evan William Gretok, and I am a student of computer engineering technology at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. This digital portfolio is a collection of coursework for you to sample and peruse, primarily showcasing professional writing samples for various courses. My discipline requires highly refined skills in written and verbal communication, and I hope you will find my work from various courses in the past several years to be proof of my growing skill-set. From formal laboratory reports, to research papers, to design proposals, to thorough evaluations; the professional writing requirement for engineering is diverse and extensive.

I am deeply passionate about programming, electronics, and computer hardware. I have completed coursework in advanced mathematics, physics, and engineering principles, and programming. I have professional experience in information technology, user services, web application development, software testing, and databases. I am currently applying my knowledge and enthusiasm to data and information structures, digital electronics, advanced programming concepts, and embedded systems. I identify as a “maker,” and am deeply interested in the application of technology in solutions to everyday problems. I am detail-oriented, focusing not only on the solution, but on the presentation and refinement of that solution. I am an imaginative, hands-on forward thinker looking to continue learning and growing, wherever my career takes me.

I consider myself a student who is looking for not just a tested learning, but a knowledge and experience that is applied to reach a concrete goal and make a difference in people’s lives. I take my academic and professional pursuits very seriously, but I also acknowledge that my degree as well as any position I will serve in is not for me. I look not to boost my own prestige, but to contribute positively to a body of professionals who seek to do their best work for the sake of the customer, the public, and the world. I am committed to upholding the ethics, responsibilities, and integrity demanded by my field to the highest degree. I aim to act for the sake of others, using my experience and abilities to better my community and the lives of the people in it.

If you have any questions about myself or the material listed here, please do not hesitate to contact me using the information in my resume. Thank you for your time and consideration. Have a remarkably pleasant day.

Evan William Gretok

Student of Computer Engineering Technology

University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

Sunday, December 13, 2015

A Presentation of Professional Writing

The following are my “cornerstone” documents, relevant examples I have handpicked and revised to highlight my professional writing at this phase of my collegiate career.  Please examine and critique them.  Feel free to inquire about their composition and content.



Written to chronicle an engineering achievement for a freshman year English composition course, “Computing Then and Now” summarizes the rise of computers as an engineering marvel.  This research report begins with ENIAC, the first modern computer system, then traces a path through modern advanced microprocessors such as the octocore, thirty-two nanometer Intel Itanium and innovative computing systems such as the parallel processing and “Deep Question Answer” technology of IBM’s Watson.  This report showcases concision and brevity as well as fully researched and cited writing.  It displays an intersection of the many categories of computer engineering, from very-large-scale integration on wafer-thin silicon to complex algorithmic implementations of abstract programming concepts across thousands of processors.  Both are subject areas I am passionate about, and the research, acronyms, and clever quips involved place this among my personal favorite writing assignments.



Written for Electronics I Laboratory in the spring term of my sophomore year, the next entry is my first formal report for an electrical engineering laboratory.  “Experiment #1: Semiconductor Diode Characteristics” outlines the experimental procedure, observations, and conclusions for an analysis of a 1N4006 diode.  While only the first experiment, and therefore not necessarily as complex as those that follow, it was among the most involved as far as theory writing.  It addresses the atomic properties and construction of semiconductors, as well as the functional characteristics of your average diode.  This passage combines application knowledge, mathematical analysis, and scatter plots to create an exhaustive representation of electrical engineering principles.



Written for a professional writing course in the fall term of my junior year, this document is an evaluation of the Kaveri microarchitecture employed in the latest iteration (at the time) of accelerated processing unit by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).  “Down to the Numbers: A Competitive Analysis of the Kaveri Microarchitecture in the AMD A8-7650K” is designed to be an application of my discipline to a key aspect of professional writing, a judgement and assessment on whether a product, service, or solution meets a goal.  It also serves as a comparative analysis of competing alternatives.  It has persuasive components, outlining attitudes towards specific processor characteristics and why particular views should be adopted.  It is designed to be accessible and explanatory to someone not well versed in the field.  I enjoyed honing my professional writing skill while applying my passion for computing architecture.



Written for my engineering design class in the spring term of my sophomore year, the "Final Report for the Intelligent Ceiling Fan" was the official submission of a full-fledged design project.  This report consists of an outline of the problem, heavily researched and cited background information, and a thorough solution proposal and design outline.  I worked with Wil Livengood, MET, lead designer, modeler, and team lead; and Steven Bucci, MET, research director and economics analyst.  I was responsible for electrical and electronics design as well as prototype construction.  This work outlines everything from manufacturing techniques to failure modes to investment distribution.  My team and I finished second place in the engineering department’s “Shark Tank” Engineering Design Competition and received high marks from the director of the department.



Programming

As a computer engineer, much of the professional writing I perform is in another language.  I have completed extensive coursework in C, Ada, Verilog, and Matlab.  I have professional experience in ColdFusion, Javascript (jQuery, AJAX), CFML, HTML, SQL, and HQL, primarily from a summer internship in software development.  I have additional personal experience in Python, Java, BASIC, and various additional shell and terminal syntaxes.  I consider coding to be one of my passions and an art form in its own right.  I have been working with code for roughly eight years now, and I am grateful to have it come somewhat easily by now.  There is a plethora of applications for programming knowledge, and I know I am only scratching the surface.  I hope to continue growing in experience with numerous other languages and techniques.  I look forward to beginning to work with Assembly in the coming months, as well as to take a class on artificial intelligence and neural networks next year.  Still, in my experience, coding is not as exciting without a concrete hardware platform, and I hope to apply my knowledge of programming to embedded system design, the internet of things, or robotics.  I have included some of my more extensive programming projects for your consideration.



This program was written for an information structures course in the fall term of my junior year.  Its purpose is to analyze and compare the performance of stacks and queues.  The program is designed to read a series of records from a text file, load them into a stack and a queue, and then perform update and delete processes on the records within those data structures.  The packages for dealing with stacks and queues were provided by the professor, while the CompositeStructures program and the input file are of my own construction.  My goal was the employment of numerous isolated functions as well as a clear, polished presentation.  The link above contains all necessary files and a text file of the output.



This is a Matlab script written for an introductory course in the fall term of my sophomore year.  This program is an animation script in which several objects or “balloons” travel around the screen, bouncing or passing through the edges and “popping” when they collide with a moving “pointy object.”  The collision detection algorithm was a particularly difficult feat to implement.  This course did not cover functions in Matlab, so the code is extensive and repeating, but still clear and commented.  If you have access to Matlab software, I encourage you to copy, paste, and run.  If you wish, alter some of the user-alterable constants to play with speeds and constraints.