SoCreate Engineer Bends Over Backward to Build His Latest Side Project

We’re kicking off the new year with an old favorite! I was thrilled to get back to SoCreate’s regularly scheduled programming in this remote work era and sit down for one of our signature Lunch Meets, a team-led learning series on cool new tech and personal team member projects. While we’d typically pull up a chair and bring our lunch to the conference room, we renewed the series as a virtual presentation via Microsoft Teams, and it was so fun to hear what senior software engineer Dana Desrosiers has been up to in his spare time. Needless to say, he has not been sitting on the bench.

While working from home, Dana has stretched himself to continue to learn new things. Recently, he decided he’d use his engineering prowess to solve a challenge he experiences outside of work while coaching gymnastics. I bet you never thought there’d be a crossover there! Instead of using tech he’s already an expert in, he’d take a deep-dive into tech that he doesn’t typically work with at SoCreate, including Blazer web assembly, .NET 5, gRPC, and Azure Cosmos DB.

Dana told us that he is often challenged by gymnastics meet results – both finding them and calculating regional standings. The current websites that offer these results lag and force the user to search out the information they need. So, using the aforementioned new tech, he turned the current process upside down.

So, Dana created an app that aggregates meet results, pulling data from other meet result sites.

While not styled yet, Dana’s new app clearly shows the meets he recently attended, allows him to follow specific athlete results, and see all of the scores for athletes at a specific gym.

The app will ultimately send a notification every time a new score pops up. Perhaps more importantly, it lets a user view results across multiple levels and age divisions in one table that isn’t currently available on other websites.

A lot easier, indeed! Dana’s project (which you can check out on GitHub here) is a shining example of how tech can enable people and simplify their lives when appropriately applied. We just never knew that there’d be parallels between these two seemingly disparate fields – software engineering and the actual parallel bars. But, SoCreators such as Dana never cease to impress and amaze!

Oohs and ahhs,