Kory Brantley
About
I love coding and creating personal projects that service both myself and also those around me. The technology that I strive to create are ones that become ubiquitous to those who use it. My passion is in creating programs and software that gets used by people from all over for an extensive set of possibilities. I have always had my heart set on doing something that gets used by people, that's so easy to use that the extensive background work that went into creating a technology is barely even noticed by the user because it is that easy to use.
My passion for computer science connected when I was going through high school, which was located in rural Georgia, a place where software designing classes were unheard of. It began when I became notorious for using Minecraft to create adventure maps for me and my friends. I didn't know it at the time, but the logic gates, the JSON formatted objects, in-game electricity and pre-set commands were just physical forms of the computer science I know today. Each of those map-building strategies were comparable to logical statements, object oriented programming, and API calls that relate to the software principles I have learned through both my education at Georgia Tech and my personal projects.
Experience
Noble Systems Corporation
Location:
Dunwoody, Georgia
Job Title:
Software Developer
Description: During the Summer of 2019, the Spring of 2020, and the Fall of 2020, I worked in the co-op program for Noble Systems on their Gamification product. In my first rotation, my team and I were responsible for completing bug fixes in the 1.0 version of the product. This involved small to medium fixes of the UI, small adjustments in the backend, and a large exposure to jQuery. During my second rotation, I was given mulitple individual features to implement for version 2.0, each requiring full-stack development using AngularJS, PHP, and PostGreSQL. I also acted as the co-op lead, where I was responsible for delegating work for two 10-point features in an effective and time efficient manner. For my third semester, I continued to work on multiple feature implementations, including a major Single Sign-On(SSO) feature that exposed me to authorization tokens, redirect URIs, and other SSO tools needed for a secure login.
Georgia Tech SGA IT Board
Location:
Atlanta, Georgia
Job Title:
Internal Tools Member/Team Lead
Description for Team Member: For the Fall of 2019-Spring 2020, I was a member on the Internal Tools team for the Student Government Association at Georgia Tech. Our main project was a website (React) where I was the frontend lead. My team and I were responsible for designing, creating, and editing each of the screens required.
Description for Team Lead: For the Summer of 2020-Summer of 2021, I am the Team Lead for the Internal Tools team for the Student Government Association at Georgia Tech. I am responsible for overseeing the production of different internal software projects that are required by other committees in SGA. At this time, my team and I have created a Slack command app, utilized the Google Maps API to show mask pick-up locations for the Fall 2020 semester, and have updated and maintained the SGA website.
Projects
Dungeons and Divs
Spring 2020 - Present
This was a personal project to create a site that me and my friends could use to create and store our character sheets for our DnD campaign. It was created using React for our frontend and originally Firebase for our backend, but was later upgraded to use Mongoose and MongoDB for our backend. This was one of my first experiences with creating a RESTful API and hosting a server on which to call our http requests.
Summer 2020: I built a chat widget that can be linked between accounts so that we could communicate through our website. Also, both users and DMs can be members of multiple parties as well as update their chat widgets to match the desired chat.
TicTacThomas
January 2021
TicTacThomas is a project that me and a friend created in a few days using React.js and Redux. This project is simply a Tic-Tac-Toe game that allows a player to play against an AI or against another player. It also will keep track of how many wins a player has, how many wins the AI/player 2 has, and how many ties there are. The AI portion of this project calculates all winning moves after the player's turn to try to play the most optimal moves to win. If it cannot win, it will default to try its best to tie the game.
Reddit Poster - SGA Email Listening Tool
Fall 2020
This project was created to be able to listen to a GaTech email and listen for incoming emails from important emails, such as the GaTech Emergency System or emails from the GaTech President. It would then take those emails, format them in markdown, and then post them to specific Reddit threads on Reddit. This is just a way for students to have another source for important emails. Reddit Poster exposed me to Reddit's API, python's IMPALIB and mailparser. This project's main hurdle was parsing an email, which proved to be difficult as the different emails were in different formats. After that, setting up a system that could format each line over to markdown had its difficulites, too. However, I was able to set up a fairly universal parser for it. It is live on the SGA designated EC2 web service through AWS.
Hawkeye - SGA Monitoring Tool
Fall 2020
Hawkeye was created to be a site monitoring tool for the different websites the fall underneath GaTech SGA IT Board's umbrella. Every 15 minutes the program pings each of the sites using CURL statements and checks the response to see if the site is currently up or down. If one of the sites returns an erroneous value, an email is sent to everyone on the emailing list (that has permission to receive information on that particular site) with an attached .txt file, containing the exact response from the CURL statements as well as information about any potential redirects that were exercised. This project is hosted on SGA's AWS EC2 platform, utilizing Python's SMTP library and Linux's crontab.
Balance Me
Summer 2020
Balance Me is designed for teenagers who live with Intellectual Development Disorders (IDDs) and suffer from a lack of task-oriented direction. The purpose of our app was to add guidance to their everyday lives by creating an easy to use interface that worked streamlessly with a remote backend that would document their upcoming tasks and remind them of when tasks were due for completion. We used React Native to create the app and Express/Mongoose/MongoDB to create the backend. I volunteered to tackle the backend and was able to successfully create a RESTful API that aligned nicely with our project's needs.
This project was created during my CS 4605 - Ubiquitous Computing class between me and 4 other class members.
Cabinet Directory
Summer 2020
Using the Slack API and Express, my team and I on the SGA IT Board: Internal Tools team created some slack commands for IT Board to be able to quickly see all the members' contact information. We hosted this on Heroku and later added a cronjob to test the commands and ensure everything was connected and returning correctly.
Satellite Tracker
Spring 2020
This was a personal project between a friend and I to create a website that could track satellites that would be visible from the current time. For our frontend, we are using Angular to dynamically create our pages. For our backend, we are using N2YO's RESTful API to pull data about specific satellites and load them into our own RESTful API. The end goal is a way of visualizing where our user should look to see certain satellites such as the International Space Station or any of the many Starlink satellites.
IT For PR
Fall 2019 - Spring 2020
During my first year on the SGA IT Board: Internal Tools, I was the frontend lead for the IT For PR project. This was created to document which clubs and organizations on Georgia Tech's campus had received certain information and presentations. I was reponsible for designing, implementing, and delegating screens to achieve our goals.
Guiding Science Annotated Bibliography Digital Library
Fall 2019
My team and I choose the Guiding Science Annotated Bibliography website redesign for our Jr Design Project. We were in contact with two amazing women who worked/had worked at the Univerity of Florida on the Guiding Science project. This project was a way of giving women from the 1700s and 1800s credit for their scientific discroveries and publications. We had the honor of creating a new website for them using React and Firebase, where I was responsible for the design and implementation of the user and admin screens. This is where I got a lot of experience with routing, material-ui, and an increased exposure to react techniques.
Webpage link (Last checked, they haven't published the new site yet but the green-background site is the old design)
Grade Calculator (React)
Summer 2019
This Grade Calculator was another personal project to expose me to React for my upcoming Jr Design project in Fall 2019. It serves the same functionality as my Java-based Grade Calculator, however this one does not use file I/O. Instead, this one mainly uses each instance of the application to store data. This was just supposed to be a small introduction to React so its capabilities are limited, but it does work.
When I joined the SGA IT Board: Internal Tools team, I wanted to learn more about how to set up and connect a backend. I branched off of master and experimented on this project , using Firebase as my database. This removed the need to reinsert my grades for each class everytime and allowed for there to be consistent values that when changed, changed in the database too.
In the Fall of 2020, I added a branch for Redux integration. I wanted to experiment with Redux and was able to successfully change from a messy stack to a sophisticated prop flow using Redux and React-Redux.
Grade Calculator (Java)
Fall 2018
This was a personal project to expose me to more Java/JavaFX. I had learned the basics in CS 1331 - Intro to OOP but I wanted to get better at it. The Grade Calculator here uses file I/O to pull local files to generate the data and calculate my overall grades for each section (HW, Exams, etc.) and my overall grade for the classes. It also had the capability to create/update/delete values for when I needed to add or change a grade for one of the sections.
Github Link (Created with Java/FX 8.0 so it is heavily outdated)
Donation Tracker App
Fall 2018
This project was created for CS 2340 - Objects and Design using Android Studio and our preffered backend (Firebase). The app was intended for a non-profit to use for tracking user donations at different locations around the United States. I was responsible for the design and implementation of our frontend, where I used Java and Android Studio's interactive layout editor to create our screens. This was also my first interaction with Google Maps API, where we showed the client different drop-off locations on a Google Map.
Github Link (Project code may be outdated)
Skills
Coursework
CS 1331 - Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming
Spring 2018
Skills: Java, JavaFX
This was my first class in Java, where we learned basics of Object Oriented Programming and data structures (Array, ArrayList, LinkedList, etc). I was also exposed to JavaFX during this course.
CS 1332 - Data Structures and Algorithms
Summer 2018
Skills: Java
This class was an introduction to data structures such as Arrays, ArrayLists, LinkedLists, and Hashmaps. We were also exposed to graph-searching algorithms (Prims, Kruskals, Djisktras, etc), sorting algorithms (Bubble, Selection, Merge, etc), and pattern matching alogrithms (Boyer-moore, KMP, Rabin-Karp).
CS 2110 - Computer Organization and Programming
Fall 2018
Skills: Assembly language, C
Logic gates, the LC-3 model, assembly language, and C were all covered in this course, using Ubuntu as a gateway to Linux. One of our projects was the creation of a video game in C, where I choose to recreate the World's Hardest Game classic.
CS 2340 - Objects and Design
Fall 2018
Skills: Android Studio, Java
This was a project class where we created a Donation Tracker for a non-profit organization. Our responsibilities were to develop an app that could store items, locations, and users using a remote backend.
CS 3600 - Intro to Artificial Intelligence
Spring 2019
Skills: Python
This class was my first exposure to Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, such as Neural Networks and Decision Trees. We were mainly responsible for programming a character to be able to make educated guesses (based on such techniques like a Markov Decision Processes) about which moves to make.
CS 3630 - Intro to Robotics and Perception
Spring 2019
Skills: Python, Scikit-image, Scikit-learn
We were given a COZMO Robot which we programmed to use a particle filter to determine its location from preset images around its area. It was also able to determine quickest paths to locations inside the arena using BUG algorithms and RRTs.
Jr Design
Fall 2019
Skills: React, Firebase
My team and I chose the Guiding Science Annotated Bibliography Digital Library redesign, where we used React and Firebase to redesign the original website with a new look and admin priviledges, which allowed for easy access to upload new works and edit existing ones
CS 4605 - Ubiquitous Computing
Summer 2020
Skills: React Native, Fitbit SDK, Mongoose, MongoDB, Express
My team of 5 were responsible for creating an application as well as a Fitbit companion to help teenagers with Intellectual Disability Disorders be able to follow a set list of tasks throughout a typical week.