LilPickle

My name is Aaron Pickard. Some call me LilPickle (because my older brother was Pickle). I’m a Computer Science grad from the University of Wyoming, so at heart I’m a cowboy but I don’t listen to (most) country music. College was cool. I’ve lived all over the midwest following ICBMs (translates to “nowhere populated or exciting”). Women, cars, movies, internet, conspiracies, soccer, and video games occupy most of my thought cycles. If you would like to know more, you can check out my personal blog at lilpickle3000.wordpress.com.

I’m an aspiring game designer currently working hard to bring you some fine Android apps. Previously, I worked my magic in a cubicle farm at O’Reilly Auto Parts on the web apps team. It was an experience. But I couldn’t take the Office Space vibe, so that’s why I set out to re-evaluate my situation. Maybe I’ll go back to school that specializes in game design. I hope to one day be responsible for the creation of the best video games around, and I want to do it all! I’m always growing experience on many of the skills that go into making games. Writing, artwork, world building, programming, experimenting with artificial intelligence… I feel I have the talent to do all kinds of creative things. Still waiting for a studio to give me a chance though. Until I get there, I’m just honing my skills I guess…

So here’s a sample of my work. I know, it needs more.

My Writing

Genetic Algorithms

This is a process description paper I wrote for my Technical Writing course.  The goal was to explain a complex idea to someone not in that field.  I tried my best to describe genetic algorithms–and I thought I took too large of a bite–but my professor was impressed so much that she wanted to keep a copy of it for her future classes.
Document – Technical Writing – Process Description

Technopoly

From my class, Communication, Technology and Society, this is one of the papers we wrote.
Document – Comm., Tech, and Society – Technopoly

My Programming

Amplizine Softworks

I create Android apps. You may have noticed. I’m thinking I’ll share some of my code and insights about Android dev on my personal blog lilpickle3000.wordpress.com soon, but no promises.

It’s O’Reilly Time!

For over three and a half years I worked at O’Reilly Auto Parts corporate HQ in Springfield, MO as a Sr. Programmer/Analyst on the Web Applications team. All my work was done on the company intranet, so sadly there isn’t anything public I can show you and say “I did that.” So you’ll have to take my descriptions of the projects I worked on as gospel. We were a Spring Framework, Hibernate, Tomcat and DB2 kind of team of 10 programmers. I worked on a few solo projects, but mostly they were done in groups of 2 or 3. We designed a tasks and compliance tracking system which all of the stores and warehouses use every day–that was by far our biggest project. One of my pet projects was the team member uniform ordering system, which somehow managed to make my birthday exciting every year by magically not doing what the client “wanted.” A suggestion box, a manufacturer contact list, and customer payment requests system were some of my other applications. One of the last projects the whole team was working on was the “Readership” project, which set broad goals involving redesigning the intranet around a Content Management System. I helped push for implementing a solution around Alfresco Enterprise Content Management rather than reinventing the wheel. I’m of the belief that too often engineers lose sight of the big picture and want to make everything their kind of perfect, rather than doing what’s best for the company. But it can be difficult to gauge sometimes too.

Mancala

This is a project description I wrote for my Evolutionary Algorithms class. I used my own technique I call “feature checking” to give my A.I. heuristic knowledge of the problem and then trained and compared it to different levels of minimax A.I.s. I had some interesting results with this one.
Document – Evolutionary Algorithms – Evolved Mancala A.I. vs Minimax A.I.
Document – Evolutionary Algorithms – Genetic Algorithm Code

Combination Lock

This is the presentation from my final project of an Electrical Engineering course. A partner and I built a 4-digit/11-key number pad lock with a reprogrammable code. This was a really fun project.

PowerPoint – Digital Design Combination Lock

My Artwork