I'm a Googler now!

September 26, 2016 by Michael Brunson

So, I work at Google now. It still feels like a dream. Google has to be one of the most sought after companies to work for, and I have to be one of the few software developers who have been given a chance to develop my skills at one of the largest technology companies in the world.

And it has been amazing so far! I'm currently part of the Engineering Residency program, a year long development program that focuses on exploring the various opportunities and technologies available at Google. It involves a 2-month training period followed by two 5-month job rotations. This has been the ultimate opportunity because I get to experience the breadth and depth of Google in such a short time.

Random Updates!

December 21, 2015 by Michael Brunson

It's been a while and a lot has happened. If you've read my previous post, I have been working on the Sudoku solver project. In a wonderful coincidence of fate, I was able to do it as part of a project I came up with for my parallel computing class at the University of South Carolina (CSCE 569).

The Results

It's terrible! In terms of real-time solving of the Sudoku puzzle, the project completely missed the mark. It terms of capturing and solving the puzzle, it does better than I ever thought it would. I'm using OpenCV for the Sudoku extraction algorithm and am implementing the digit recognizer using a K nearest neighbor technique. More information about the project can be found at this link here.

What's Next?

This project sparked my interest in image processing with respect to machine vision applications. So, I've decided to start another project to create a library to do image processing on mobile platforms. OpenCV actually has an Android/iOS compatible version, but I wanted to create something more streamlined with simple features. The repository for this project can be found here. I've already implemented a few features (grayscale, edge detection, Gaussian blur, etc.) in RenderScript. I'm going to compare this to the native Java version and see if there's any noticeable speedup. I suspect there will be a significant increase unless my RenderScript code is horrible (it probably is :-P). I've noticed that the intrinsic RenderScript functions are much faster than any basic implementation because they are fine tuned for the hardware and written on an extremely low level (I'm talking assembly code in some cases here). You can't get much better performance in that respect.

I think this image above is interesting, but I've only written one line in PHP ever! It might be interesing to learn though. I've mostly been using ASP.net and Node.js.--Photo by Denis Belyaevskiy/iStock / Getty Images — I think this image above is interesting, but I've only written one line in PHP ever! It might be interesing to learn though. I've mostly been using ASP.net and Node.js.
--Photo by Denis Belyaevskiy/iStock / Getty Images

It's been a while...

January 15, 2015 by Michael Brunson

It's been a very busy time. The preparation for exams mixed with working TWO jobs (both of which I love) has kept me very busy. I'm not the kind of person to sit on his laurels. I like to stay busy. The good news is that I aced my exams. The operating systems class was a cram fest, but the algorithms class was easy. At the moment, I'm still working on personal projects. I'm jumping around here and there just to find something interesting to work on.

I'm still tweaking the Collabrd web application, but I'm going to redesign it from the ground up at this point. I don't like the way I wrote it in Angular, so I might take the time to work on it. It was something I threw together in the span of a weekend anyway, so I didn't expect it to be the most organized thing. I want to do it right this time, so I'm starting over.

I'm also starting to get into Android development. I really want to make an app to solve Sudoku puzzles and Rubik's cubes. I think the Sudoku project will be easier since I actually had a working prototype for the basic solver (brute force recursion) and the image processing algorithms using OpenCV. The missing piece was the digit recognizer to convert the image of digits into stored, digital numbers. I think I will implement a neural network to do this, but I have to learn how to build one first :-P. The Rubik's Cube will be tougher to solve, but the image processing will be easier since there are no digits to recognize. :-)

-Michael

CollabBrd website created...but there are issues

October 13, 2014 by Michael Brunson

Yay! CollabBrd Pre-Alpha version has finally been hosted on Azure; however, the website is broken. My development version running on my local system ran perfectly fine. When I published the application to Azure, it seemed to publish just fine. After waiting a minute before accessing the app, I navigated to the page ( http://collabbrd.azurewebsites.net ) and discovered that all of the Web API and Breeze content was broken. Toastr posted a message about multiple requests to the same context is not allowed. I'm thinking this may be an issue with the Azure server configuration, but I'm looking into it. There's only so much free time for a college student...

It's an HTTP error. This is from a Breeze API controller method.

HackerRank Back2School Code Sprint

Swearingen Engineering Center

October 04, 2014 by Michael Brunson

I took the time last night to participate in the University of South Carolina's code-a-thon meeting for the HackerRank Back2School Code Sprint contest. Arriving bright and early at 9PM, my fellow students and I cranked out code like no tomorrow. After working through the night for 12 hours, there were only a few of us left. We never got the solution to some of the problems, but it was great to meet with people just to solve some problems. I hope we do it again next semester.

HackerRank Back2School CodeSprint 2014 contest

I'm currently sitting in 106 place out of 500+ coders. It wasn't a bad night at all. I guess I'll work on some personal projects now. I'll probably start something new. Stick around and see what happens!

-Michael

Hello, blog!

October 02, 2014 by Michael Brunson

Welcome to my first blog! There is a lot of content to come: tech news, gadget news, opinions, programming (and probably lots of it). Stay tuned because the future is truly right around the corner. . .

For the programmers, here's a picture that made my day. Enjoy, nerds!

-Michael