Communication skills are hard to quantify. “One time, I sent an email…” isn’t convincing evidence. The evidence I have:

  • Creating and leading corporate training events
  • Teaching assistant for a cybersecurity bootcamp
  • A lightning talk at a regional tech conference
  • Presentations at local tech meetups
  • This website

I’ve written, prepared, and lead training events as part of my role as a Solutions Architect on the OP5 Professional Services team. I would gather training requirements from the client by asking them what areas they would like to focus on. Some organizations wanted to focus on the API of the software, some wanted to focus on the web interface, and some wanted both. Once the requirements had been gathered, I would setup the training schedule, compile the training modules, and prepare example scenarios for the virtual labs.

Depending on how much time I had, I would work on improving the training modules and labs. I wrote a module which demonstrated how to work with the application’s API, and I would rework the other modules as time permitted. For the virtual labs, I would setup various pieces of software or write little programs or services which could be setup and used to demonstrate the learning objectives.

As a Teaching Assistant as part of the 2U/edX cybersecurity bootcamp, I help students with their understanding of the material and concepts. The students have varying levels of technical skills, or the material is new to them even if they have a tech background, and as such, I need to be able to explain the concepts in a way which is clear and enables comprehension of the topic. An example of this is the time I explained how a Unix shell finds the programs to run. Unix shells store a list of locations in the $PATH environmental variable, and this is like looking for car keys. If we’re looking for our keys, we have a list of locations they could be, like in the couch, and we check the locations until we find, or don’t find, the keys.

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to give a lightning talk as a FreeCodeCamp Oklahoma representative at Techlahoma’s Thunderplains 2020 conference. It was a quick talk about errors people make when starting new projects. Thunderplains was nice enough to record the presentation, and it’s linked below.

For local tech meetups, I’ve presented at Tulsa Web Devs, Oklahoma City (OKC) SQL, and OKC Python. The presentations for Tulsa Web Devs were an introduction to OpenBSD, with a live installation, and an introduction to the Go programming language with code examples. OKC SQL was an overview of PostgreSQL authentication with demonstrations of the various mechanisms. OKC SQL was another lightning talk about the Cython library with a program I wrote to demonstrate the speed difference and how to use the library.

In addition to those presentations, there is the FreeCodeCamp Oklahoma Django Girls workshop I volunteered at. I served as a mentor and a presenter. As a mentor, I helped the students through any problems they encountered and provided resource to answer questions. The presentation was an explanation of open source. What is open source, and how it works.

This website is meant to be a giant cover letter. It’s a place for people to get a feel for who I am, and it’s a place for me to talk about my experiences as well as document my work over the years.

Links to presentations:

  1. Wading Into PostgreSQL Authentication - Ryan Quinn: OKC SQL ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmGSymjztqU )
  2. What is Open Source - Ryan Quinn: freeCodeCamp Oklahoma ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iikoCZUZPyw )
  3. Cython Overview - Ryan Quinn: OKC Python ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OgGqklYH8o )
  4. What Not to Do When Starting a New Project - Ryan Quinn | ThunderPlains 2020 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7vRw0H2dyQ )