Blake Pastrana

About Me

I'm a high energy, self-motivated software developer that is excited to start his professional career. After recently graduating from JMU in 3 years, I now work as a Software Engineer for Accenture Federal Services. I have a passion for creating high performing, beautiful, mobile friendly web applications. I have two life rules:

Never stop learning.
Try and leave this world a little better than you found it.

Learning is one of my favorite hobbies, and has led to the publishing of various projects which you can view below! I'm excited to be a part of and contribute to the technological revolution our world is currently in, and I have big dreams and visions for the future of software and technology.

Experience

Accenture

Software Developer

I currently work as a software engineer for Accenture, where I help design, create, and manage software projects for federal clients. Utilizing various tech stacks, I implement high performance systems while working with clients to help them achieve their goals. I also took a leadership position, which involves various duties while continuing to complete my day to day software work. These duties include:

Gathering requirements from the client and implementing them across Java and C# tech stacks to best solve the problem at hand.
Ensuring code quality of the contract by being a code reviewer.
Interviewing candidates to determine if they were the right fit technically and behaviorally for the contract.
Understanding and implementing CI/CD for our projects to streamline releases.
Delivering brown-bag informational sessions to other developers on various topics.

Sony

Global Security Incident Response Team Intern

I served as a security operations intern for Sony between my second and final year at college. I worked with Analysts in the SOC to understand Cyber-Security at a corporate level. My tasks revolved around:

Shadowing Event Analyst responding to security threats across the globe.
Creating an applet for the Security team to use during presentations using HTML and JavaScript.
Beginning to implement an open-source database to store and visualize data using ElasticSearch and Kibana.
Beginning to implement a Java program to store tweets that contained customizable keywords for security monitoring.

Raley, Watts & O'Neill Insurance and Financial Services

IT Intern

For my first internship, I served as an IT intern. My tasks included:

Maintaining staff members’ hardware and software under the supervision of the IT department head
Diagnosing computer problems and effecting relevant repairs
Assisting coworkers with software-related issues

Education

James Madison University

August 2013 - May 2016

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

I attended JMU from 2013 - 2016. I completed my undergrad in 3 years, graduating and starting my first job at the age of 20. Freshman year, I was a part of their marching band, the Marching Royal Dukes. My second year, I served as a Residential advisor. This involved over-seeing 26 freshman students by serving as a resource as well as enforcing dorm policy. My final year at JMU, I was a Teaching Assistant to the programming fundamentals class in the Computer Science department. I worked in the computer lab, assisting students with programming projects, labs, and studying for tests. This involved clarifying information regarding Object Oriented programming, recursion, and data structures. This also included debugging student’s code when they ran into an issue on their project, and explaining why their issue occurred.

Highlights:

Completed the coursework as a distinguished graduate in 3 years.
Served as a teacher's assistant for the introduction to Java course for freshmen.
Joined the JMU Computer Science Honor Society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

Projects

Drive Fitness

Drive Fitness is a mobile application that allows you to create custom exercises to track your progress, as well as a social aspect to compete with friends!

View Project

Aviditi (formely known as QuantumWare Apps)

Worked with a graphic designer to create various mobile applications. These apps were made for clients, personal use, and Hackathons. After a hiatus during the final year of university, we have rebranded and are expecting to release our flagship application this year!