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Nick Faulkner

About Me

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My name is Nick Faulkner and I am currently a sophomore at Brown University. I was born and raised in a small tourist town called Homer, Alaska (the picture above was taken in Homer of its famous Kachemak Bay). For high school, I decided to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After four amazing years at Andover, I then chose to attend Brown University.

During my freshman fall at Brown, I spontaneously decided to take an introductory computer science class, as it was something I had never done before but was very interested in. After a semester of hard work, I found that I absolutely loved it and plan to pursue a major in CS. My passion for computer science lies largely in using it to create programs that allow people to take advantage of our greatest resource: each other. I admire modern day companies that use technology to bring people together for mutual benefit. Developing and making these sorts of technologies easy to use and accessible to everyone is a goal I have for myself moving forward.

My Personal Projects

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Tix

tixconcerts.com
My Code

During the summer after my freshman year of college, my friends and I were looking for concerts in the Boston area. We wanted to go to our favorite artists' concerts, and wondered why we there wasn't a tool to find tickets for our favorite artists automatically. This was the beginning of my idea for Tix.

Using Spotify and Ticketmaster's API, Tix allows you to conveniently view all of the concerts for your top artist on Spotify. I developed Tix completely on my own, and it helped me gain a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience using API's and developing a website in general. As of right now, 35 new people use Tix each day, and this number is still growing as I continue to develop its functionality.

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Pac-Man

My Code

As the final project to my introductory computer science class, I had to choose from a variety of games to make from scratch, and I chose Pacman. Written in Java, using object-oriented programming, I created Pacman completely on my own, without any stencil code. For the ghosts' searching functionality, I created an algorithm that utilizes breadth first search of the board to continuously update the ghosts' target location.

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Read to Me

My Code

Read to me is a chrome extension that reads highlighted text to you. I got the idea for this when I had to read an online article for a class. I knew most computers had the basic functionality of reading text to the user, but I wanted to learn how the technology works while also gaining some experience with chrome extension. The result was my first chrome extension-- Read to Me.

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Website Parser

My Code

During my internship at Black Duck, I was tasked with the project of creating an excel spreadsheet of companies that were attending a tech conference. To do this manually would have taken me hours, if not days, to do, so I decided to write a Python script to do it for me. This Python script parsed the HTML on the webpage to gather information given on the page and then created an excel spread sheet from that data. This allowed me to finish the project much quicker than expected and was much less tedious.

Experience

Black Duck Software

Jun-Aug 2017

Black Duck Software is an open source risk management firm with three hundred full time employees and nearly $80m in annual revenue. By scanning clients’ code, Black Duck identifies the open-source components used in the company's software, and reports the potential license and security risks associated with these components. Black Duck's notable partners include Google, HP, and RedHat, and a few of its notable customers include Samsung, Intel, NASA, Uber, Verizon, BP, and Reddit.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I worked at Black Duck as a Sales Engineer Intern. As a Sales Engineer Intern, I worked closely with both the software engineering and business teams. A majority of my time was spent working alongside the integrations team to develop new functionality for our products. I spent several weeks developing a program in Java that would identify open-source dependencies in projects written in R, a language used mostly for data science. This program was then implemented into the company's flagship product: Black Duck Hub-Detect. In addition to programming, I was also able to experience the business side of technology and understand better the nuance of how deals are made with customers in the tech industry. Specifically, providing proof of concepts and demos for customers helped me gain a deep knowledge of Black Duck’s product and how to implement it.

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Rough Draft Academy

Jun-Aug 2017

Powered by General Catalyst, Rough Draft is a student-run venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage, dormroom startups. Rough Draft created a selective summer program for college software engineers to immerse themselves in entrepeneurship activites. Throughout the summer, we visited succesful startups throughout the greater Boston area to meet with and learn from their executives. I met fellow engineers and entrepeneurs from a variety of different schools, and was able to compliment my engineering skills with the business skills that are necessary to turn an idea into a viable business.

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Land's End Resort

Summers 2012-2015

Land's End Resort is year-round resort in Homer, Alaska. The resort is comprised of a high-end restaurant, spa, several condos, and over ninety hotel rooms. Land’s End Resort employs about seventy-five employees each year. I started working at Land's End the summer before my freshman year of high school. I worked as a member of Land's End housekeeping team for two summers, cleaning hotel rooms and washing laundry to remake the rooms. After two summers as a housekeeper, I moved to the maintenance team, where I was involved in everything from painting, landscaping, construction, and fixing appliances, to picking up guests at the airport and carrying their bags. For the summers after my junior and senior years of high school, I worked in Land's End's restaurant as a busser and food runner/expeditor.

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