Our recent guest speaker to the WV Coding Club was Matthew Worden, PMP, PSM, System Architect at Danfoss.
Originally from Charleston, WV, Matthew left the state at 18 to travel and volunteer for Americorp. During that time, he worked with Habitat for Humanity, Easterseals, Underprivileged Schools and National Park Services. Matthew went to school in Florida and earned his associates degree in computational programming and analysis from Pensacola State College. Next, He got his undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering at Florida A&M University. Following that he got his masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from FSU with a focus on smart materials and computational analytics. He is also a certified Project Management Professional and a Profession Scrum Master.
During his time in college, he moonlighted as a junior consultant and software developer. He worked on projects for the university that created high energy physics models. He also worked on projects for the state that developed statewide emergency system networks.
Currently Matthew is working as a System Architect and Technical Team Lead at Danfoss, LLC. He is leading the Turbocor Digital Platform project bringing manufacturing and data warehouse HVAC systems online across the globe. He does this work remotely and currently lives in Morgantown, WV as part of the WV Ascend program, a program that brings remote workers into the state. He and his family spend their time turning their property into a farm and currently have chickens and bees.
A little more info about Danfoss:
Driven by the potential of an electrified society, and powered by the opportunities of going digital, Danfoss is engineering technology that helps the world to get much more out of less. With the promise of quality, reliability and innovation deeply rooted in our DNA, Danfoss delivers an extensive range of products and solutions across our business segments of Danfoss Climate Solutions, Danfoss Drives and Danfoss Power Solutions. Danfoss has over 42,000 employees worldwide and sales in over 100 countries. It also has 97 factories in 20 countries. Danfoss is one of the world’s leading suppliers of innovative and energy-efficient solutions that increase machine productivity, reduce emissions, lower energy consumption, and enable electrification.
Topics Matthew discussed include IOT (Internet of Things) and in general how it is leading to predictive maintenance for manufacturing plants, hospitals, data warehouses and other critical installations. He spoke on managing big data and how it is different from traditional database approaches. He described what it’s like to manage teams of programmers and also how to approach AI in your projects.
Matthew gave our club the following advice:
1. When you approach a problem, the first step is to jump in. Investigate, learn as much of you can. Determine the context and scour the internet for others who solved the problem. Then, if you can’t solve it, put it down. Walk away for a while. Let you brain focus on other things. Give yourself time to absorb the new information and the space to get perspecive. Often you will be able to solve it after a few hours of this.
2. You’re going to face problems and fail, just don’t quit. Have some confidence and persevere. You don’t have to solve it today. As long as you keep coming back to the problem, you will chip away at it until you succeed.
3. Everybody needs programmers! There is not a company or type of business that doesn’t need software.
When asked about how to get into AI, Matt responded, if interested in AI (Artificial Intelligence) development here are some things to explore and learn. Math behind deep learning algorithms Stanford online courses. Google TensorFlow, Python, Pandas, NumPy, R, are the big ones.
When asked about Quantum Computing and AI working together. – Matt described using the computing power to calculate 60,000 answers at once, then using AI to pick out the pattern from a probability of answers.
President of the West Virginia Coding Club, Dan McElroy emphasized, "Matthew is a perfect example of a West Virginian, who developed his coding skills and chose to live in West Virginia, but works remotely for an International Company. We deeply appreciate his insights into his journey to help our WV Coding Club students learn about another path to success using coding as a fundamental skill. Thank you Matthew!"
Thank you Matthew for your time, insights and for being another great West Virginia success story!!
Keep Coding!