My name is David Clevenger and I graduated in Spring 2015 with a major in Computer Science. I am currently working as a software engineer at Capital One in McLean, VA (though currently working from “home” in Washington, DC).

David Clevenger

My team focuses on when and how to best reach out to Capital One credit card holders who may have missed a payment, or are a few behind. We maintain a suite of microservices deployed on Amazon Web Services written primarily in Java, with a few Lambdas running Python. This week I am working on a microservice to check equivalence of schedules created from two different upstream producers.

As of August, I hit the one year mark with Capital One and the transition from college to career was quite a big step in my life. I found the transition to have a similar feeling as your first day of college — you’re moving into your dorm, seeing unfamiliar faces, not sure what lies ahead.

At UT, I took a number of classes that made me very well prepared for the hard and soft skills needed at work. Professor Henley’s Software Engineering class taught me a lot of things that would usually not be taught in the standard computer science curriculum like Git, tools, and design principles (see MIT OCW Missing Semester on YouTube). Professor Huang’s Systems Programming class taught me the ideals of Unix design — single purpose, mechanism vs. policy, what it really means to be a hacker. And of course, I seem to find myself daily needing to program a UART driver, and Stephen Marz’s Operating Systems course has just that.