This summer has been a productive time for four students at The Ohio State University. They are working to earn a degree in Computer Science and search for jobs following graduation. During this process, they worked on the AFFORDABLE platform as part of their graduation requirement–a capstone project. John Spurney, graduating this fall, decided to talk about his experiences over the semester. “It [AFFORDABLE] is a non-profit organization that is on the way to accomplish great things for the community! There is definitely a need for a system that is able to match people with the appropriate healthcare resources, and I think that AFFORDABLE can fulfill this need.” Another important reason why he chose AFFORDABLE over other potential projects was because, “… the one thing that caught my attention when reviewing the different project proposals was how organized and clear the expectations were in the project proposal submitted by AFFORDABLE. But ultimately what swayed me to choose AFFORDABLE was that I saw potential in the project.
These students chose to work on the AFFORDABLE project to help bring people closer to healthcare. Given the sensitive nature of information and financial aid that are intended to channel through the network, they wanted to help ensure that both charities and users could feel confident in the systems security to protect their information. “My team focused on adding additional account management features and improving the overall security of the application. Our broad scope gave us the opportunity to work on all the different parts of the web development stack,” John said.
They helped integrate important user options that allowed for verifying email addresses, sending email notifications, two-factor authentication using mobile devices, an activity tracker recording all actions on the account, account timeout, and much more! John said the team approached this development challenge by, “sticking to well known (and effective) software development practices. As a team we decided to incorporate what we thought were the most influential agile methodologies into our work flow.”
Overall, the user accounts are much more secure than before. An important mission is to have a feeling of safety and security when searching for healthcare support and feeling comfortable to share your experience with others. The team, consisting of John Spurney, Andrew Hamiel, Nick Miller, and Lexus Uhlir learned about new techniques and tools that will help them build software more effectively in the future. With regards to his team he said, “They [his Team] were all great, and it makes me proud to be a Buckeye! I learned tons from each of my teammates.”
John is planning to work in the field of robotics after graduation. With regards to this project, he mentioned that, “The more experience the better! I got to polish my front-end skills by building some React components, and improved my general Node.js development skills by contributing to back-end api-work.” We wish them all the best moving forward with their careers, and everyone at AFFORDABLE enjoyed getting to know this development team and hope to keep in touch!
Below, we wanted to share some information about all the members of the team and what they’re plans were after graduation:
John Spurney
I am senior majoring in Computer Science and Engineering graduating on December 2019. Upon graduation I would like to get a job in the robotics industry. In my spare time I like working on indie games.
Andrew Hamiel
I am a senior majoring in Computer and Information Science graduating in the Summer 2019 semester. I have accepted a full-time job upon graduation in Chicago, Illinois with JPMorgan Chase, where I will be developing back-end micro-services to help the company along its cloud transformation journey. I have additional industry experience with Nationwide, where I worked as a test automation developer within a group that supported front-end applications for Nationwide Financial. Most of my experience is with back-end software, but I am looking forward to the new experience of working with my first mobile application and continuing the development of Affordable, an application with really immense value in healthcare!
Nick Miller
I am a senior graduating in the Summer 2019 term as with a bachelors in Computer Science as well as a minor in Business. I am originally from North Canton, Ohio, where I went to Massillon-Jackson High School. I have accepted a full-time job to work at Nationwide Insurance as a Java Developer on an agile team starting in late August. As an intern at Nationwide the past few summers, I witnessed agile in practice, and gained experience in test automation, back-end development as well as some front-end (angular) experience. I am excited to get to work on Affordable and be a part of providing healthcare to those who need it!
Lexus Uhlir
I am an undergraduate student intended to graduate in with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering in December. My specialization is in software engineering with the hopes to acquire a job in mobile app development, web development, front-end or full-stack development. I am from Massillon, Ohio. I’m currently a supervisor at Starbucks in Upper Arlington. I have some experience with mobile application development I am looking forward to expanding my knowledge with this project while also being able to be apart of an experience that can help others.
