Noah Blume

Just a guy who likes Tech

I'm a software engineer from Jefferson City, Missouri who studied computer science at Georgia Tech. I like bad puns, sweet tea, and just about anything related to computers.

I also like XKCD comics.

A Little Bit About Me

General Info

I recently graduated from Georgia Tech, where I studied computer science. I am currently employed at Google as a software engineer.

As far as programming languages go, I'm most familiar with Java, Python, C, C#, and JavaScript. I also have experience using CSS, HTML, AngularJS, jQuery, and Bootstrap. In my spare time I have worked on a few video games in Unity, created a couple of websites, and written various Python scripts to automate tasks for me.

Internships

Amazon

Summer of 2019, I worked at Amazon as a software development engineer intern. I worked on a prototype of a new authentication method for the Amazon mobile apps. The authentication features I worked on are expected to greatly reduce the account takeover rate for Amazon customers.

First Data

Summer of 2018, I worked at First Data as a software development intern. I created an application monitoring UI, giving developers quick access to important information regarding the status of applications. The monitoring application gets a list of apps from a (Netflix) Eureka service registry and pulls information from the Spring Boot Actuator endpoints of each registered application. The application stores metrics values in a SQL database; these values are used to generate charts displaying a historical overview of the metrics.

Central Technology Services

Summer of 2017, I worked at Central Technology Services (under Central Bancompany) as a software development intern. I developed bug fixes for their website and created a web application backed by a SQL database to store and manage properties that are used by the bank's mobile apps. Developers can manage the properties through the web application, and the mobile app makes an API request to get the correct properties from the database for that version of the app. I also updated their Android app to use Google Maps API v2, and refactored the app to reduce duplicate code and use Android’s “Product Flavors” instead of separate projects for different app versions.

Additional Experience

Teaching Assistant

Spring 2018, I was a teaching assistant for CS 2050 (Discrete Math). Since Fall 2018, I have been a teaching assistant for CS 3510 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms). As a TA I lead recitation sections with my Co-TAs and hold office hours to help students better understand the concepts from lecture. I'm also responsible for helping to make and grade the homework assignments and exams.

Help Desk Technical Assistant

During my first few semesters at Tech, I worked as a technical assistant at the Georgia Tech College of Computing TSO Help Desk. At the Help Desk I was responsible for assisting anyone who came in with any kind of computer trouble. I also had to frequently reimage and install software on computers.

Projects I've Worked On

Here are a few projects I've worked on. If you would like to view the code, many of the projects have a GitHub link provided. You are also welcome to visit my GitHub page to see other projects I have worked on.

Brainy Words 2000 (2019)

For Junior Design (Georgia Tech's capstone course), my team made a game to help young children improve their vocabulary. The game consists of a street that has various words for kids to learn, as well as storefronts containing categories of words that kids can takes quizzes over.

Spotify Sleep Timer (2019)

This is a site I made where one can set a timer to stop their Spotify playback. I often fall asleep while music is playing on my desktop, so I made this site to pause the music after a certain amount of time. I also made an option for the volume to gradually decrease as the timer progresses (reaching 0 volume as the timer runs out).

Spotify Playlist Generator (2018)

This is a site I made to generate playlists based on your music interests. I liked Spotify's Weekly Discovery playlist, but wanted to have more than just one playlist per week, so I made a site to generate them for me. The site tries to make a playlist with artists you haven't listened to yet who are similar to artists you already like.

GT Safe Walk Map (2017)

This is a web app I made during the 2017 fall semester. It uses GTPD's crime logs to show a heatmap of crimes on campus. The heatmap is based on the time of day, so it will adjust based on where crimes are most frequent during different times. The application will also attempt to find the safest route from one point on campus to another.

Upcoming Music Releases Site (2017)

This is a site my cousin and I started working on over the summer of 2017. We collected data about upcoming album releases and inserted the data into a MySQL database. We then populated the web page with the upcoming album releases from the database using PHP.

JavaScript Calculator (and various other things) (2017)

This is a little site I made to get some practice using JavaScript and Bootstrap. I've posted a link to the site just below if you want to check it out. The site has a functioning calculator that I wrote in JavaScript, as well as a table that gets cryptocurrency data from CoinMarketCap's API and displays the recent changes in the values of the cryptocurrencies.

Reddit Summarizer Bot (2018)

This is a Reddit bot I made that will summarize long comments or posts. A user can reply to a comment or a post with "ShortenThis!" and the bot will create a shortened version of the original post. The default length of the summary is 5 sentences, but one can specify a custom number of sentences. For example, "ShortenThis! 10" will make a summary of 10 sentences. The bot is written in Python, using the PRAW library as a wrapper for the Reddit API and the Sumy library for handling summarization. It is hosted on a Google Compute Engine instance, where it regularly checks for new summary requests.

/r/indieheads New Music Bot (2018)

This is a Reddit bot I made that will send a notification whenever a post for new music on r/indieheads passes a certain point threshold. Users can be notified via Reddit PM, email, or both. Users are also able to set the point threshold to whatever they like. This bot is also written in Python using the PRAW library and is hosted on a Google Compute Engine instance.

Twitter Music Review Bot (2017)

Sometime during the 2017 fall semester I got bored and decided make a Twitter bot. It looks for albums reviews from Pitchfork and The Quietus, then uses Markov chains to generate a brief review. It also uses sentiment analysis to generate a review score based on the positivity of the original review.

Best New Music Emailer (2017)

This is a python script that I wrote which will check Pitchfork's (music news/review) site every few hours to see if they have given any new albums the title of "Best New Music." The script will then send me an email containing the artist, album title, genre, review score, and a link to the review. This is a nice way for me to get new music recommendations without having to frequently check review sites or music forums.

VPN Detector (2017)

Since the FCC's broadband privacy protections were repealed in early 2017, allowing ISPs to collect and sell personal data, I've become more diligent about my VPN usage. I made this script to check once every 10 minutes if I have my VPN on, and if I don't, it will give me a desktop notification letting me know that I may want to turn it back on. (I'm not really a big fan of getting notifications on my desktop, so I made the notification message a little silly to lessen my annoyance from being notified.)

Printer Paper Supply Checker (2016)

This is a Python script I wrote to automatically check the paper supply of printers where I work. Each of the 10 printers has a site that displays the paper levels. To check the paper levels, one would normally have to log into each of the 10 sites and record each printer's paper level before going out to restock the paper. This was rather tedious and time consuming, so I wrote a Python script that logs into and scrapes all of the websites to check the paper levels. The script then updates a Google spreadsheet with how many reams of paper each printer needs.

Blocks and Balls (2015)

This is the first app I published to the App Store and Google Play Store with my cousin. We worked on it during the beginning of 2015 and published it that summer. It is a really simple mobile game about hitting blocks with balls.

Procedurally Generated Platformer (2015)

I had a ton of fun making this. My cousin and I decided to spend part of our 2015 Thanksgiving break creating a procedurally generated platformer in 48 hours. It is not a fully functional game; however, we were able to get the main gameplay mechanics and basic procedural generation finished.

Blocks and Balls: Unblocked (2016)

This is the sequel to Blocks and Balls. In early 2016, my cousin and I rebuilt the original game from the ground up to make it run better, then we added unlockable (or "unblockable") colors that you could choose from for the blocks and balls.

Elon Musk Text Replacement Firefox Add-on (2018)

This is a simple Firefox add-on I made that replaces "Elon Musk" with "Grimes's boyfriend" in your browser. I created this shortly after it was discovered that Elon Musk was dating the singer, songwriter, record producer, and visual artist known as Grimes.

Contact Me

If you would like to get in touch with me, you can add me on LinkedIn.