Punchmark's Development team recently grew by 1 with the addition of Andy Szoke, a Back End Developer with a wealth of experience. He joins us to assist with building scalable solutions for our platform. Michael Burpoe, Director of User Experience, sat down with him to learn more.
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Michael Burpoe: Hey Andy! How are you doing today?
Andy Szoke: Hey Mike! Pretty good, working on getting plugged into the code that powers Punchmark
MB: Hacking the matrix already, I like it. Can you tell the people what your role will be at Punchmark?
AS: Haha for sure. I was brought on as a Back End Developer, but I also have some experience with front end development, so I'll be using that knowledge as well
MB: Nice! You have a lot of experience as a Developer prior to joining us, right?
AS: Yep, I've been a professional developer for 4 years. I've worked on all sorts of different systems at this point, so I'm excited to see how I can help out here at Punchmark!
MB: You do a lot of pet development projects too. Any good ones you wanna give an overview on?
AS: Sure, right now I'm working on an LED scoreboard for the man cave at home. It's got a few LED panels hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, and it pulls live scores and stats from different sports leagues (currently just MLB, with the NFL in the works) and displays them in real time. That's been a lot of fun to work on, and definitely looks pretty cool hanging up on the wall!
MB: When you get the NFL scores hooked up you'll be able to see the Panthers losing in beautiful LED! Too soon?
AS: Haha hopefully by the time it's finished they'll be winning again, maybe they'll even have their quarterback figured out!
MB: Hahaha! Your path to getting picked up at Punchmark was a little atypical. Can you share a little light on how you heard about Punchmark?
AS: So I play disc golf on the weekends (think golf with frisbees in the woods, if you haven't heard of it) with a group of friends, including a few people who work here at Punchmark. I'd been looking for new opportunities, so one of the guys in the group named Mike Burpoe (you may have heard of him) invited me to apply for a back end position that Punchmark had open. It seemed like an interesting opportunity, so I applied and made my way through the interview rounds. It ended up working out, so I joined the (probably small) club of people who got connected with a new job through disc golf!
Lucky for Punchmark, I'm a better developer than I am a disc golfer
MB: I love that story! You heard it here, Disc Golf is the new corporate mixer in the tech world!
Well thanks so much Andy! I am very excited to have you aboard. Hopefully we can play a few rounds at lunch soon! Before we end, can you give the readers one song I should embed at the end of this blog post?
AS: I'll give you a classic, Joker and the Thief by Wolfmother. Looking forward to the lunch round!