Software Development Graduate Impresses Amazon with his Skills

Alex Shultz is the kind of person employers covet. A self-starter with a passion for lifelong learning, this former Navy gunner’s mate and Virginia Beach Software Development graduate is now a senior software engineer at Princeton TMX in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Not long ago, Alex learned about a contest sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Intel which challenged competitors to create a machine learning application using a new device Amazon had just released called DeepLens, a wireless-enabled video camera and development platform integrated with the AWS Cloud. It allows developers to use the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and technology to develop computer vision applications based on a deep learning model.

Although he had no machine learning experience, Alex taught himself what he needed to know and within a couple months, had created an app called ReadToMe, which combines deep learning and computer vision with services available in AWS. Just show the AWS DeepLens a page and it reads it aloud. Alex built ReadToMe using a combination of technologies that were all new to him, including Python, Amazon Polly, AWS Greengrass, AWS Lambda, Tesseract OCR, Apache MXNet, and TensorFlow.

“One of the reasons I chose to get into software development is because it’s always changing,” says Alex. “It means you are never done learning, and that keeps things fresh and exciting. ECPI University provided the foundation I needed to get into this field. It wasn’t always easy balancing work and school, but after my first programming class, I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do and that it was going to be worth the effort.

“The faculty was great, and as most of them were still working in the industry, they were also very knowledgeable and up to date with the latest changes in the field. Software Development is a great place to be right now. There are so many exciting opportunities and there are tons of open positions for skilled engineers!”