About Me

My name is Matthew Reeves. I was born in Oklahoma City, OK, but spent most of my life growing up in Council Bluffs, IA. Obviously many things happened in my life between birth and my high school graduation, but very little of that is interesting from a professional perspective. After graduating High School, I spent a lot of time working towards my Undergraduate degree. I started out majoring in Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University in Ames, IA. I enjoyed the program, but switched majors away from it (ironically) because I hated the programming courses that were required. In my defense though, it was my first experience with programming and we were using FORTRAN exclusively with a very unfriendly Watcom compiler. This was in the year 2002. Now, with a better understanding of programming languages, I can appreciate that FORTRAN can be very useful to an engineer due to its efficiency with number crunching, but it is decidedly not beginner-friendly.

When I switched majors for the first time, I switched to Physics. In high school Physics had been my favorite subject, and majoring in Physics also allowed me to keep my original career goal of working in the aerospace industry. I also switched colleges from Iowa State, to the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Switching colleges was advantageous for me because I had a scholarship that was worth a four year full ride at any school in Nebraska, but only five thousand dollars per year outside of Nebraska. I spent a lot of time in the Physics program, but was never completely happy with it. After the remainder of my scholarship ran out, I switched my enrollment to part-time so that I could work full-time, and figure out what I really wanted to do as a career.

While I was working full-time, I worked at CompUSA until they went under, and then worked in tech support for Cox Communications. Working these two jobs made me realize how much I enjoyed working with technology. As interested as I was in learning about new advances in Physics, and understanding how it could explain the behavior of the universe, I finally recognized that I just did not see myself being a working physicist for the rest of my life. I could see myself working with computers. I didn't want to go rushing into another major switch though (at this point I was roughly three semesters out from getting a physics degree). Instead I picked up a few computer science classes to see how I liked programming. This was especially important to me given that programming was what had prompted me to switch out of my original major.

To make a long story short, I liked the computer science courses. I was also confident that a computer science degree would be more marketable than a physics degree, with the added benefit of not automatically requiring graduate school to get a job. So I switched my major again, and eventually went back to school full-time. On May 4th, 2013 I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a concentration in Information Assurance. Through the Information Assurance concentration I took I also became CNSS 4011, CNSS 4012, and CNSS 4013 certified. Shortly before graduating I received an internship at Ballantyne Strong, Inc. in Omaha, NE where I began my career as an IT professional.

TL;DR I spent 10 years as an undergrad across multiple majors, life experiences eventually led me to graduating with a Computer Science degree, and I am now very happy with where I ended up.

About This Site

I've written this site using HTML5 for markup, CSS3 for consistent styling and formatting, and JavaScript for any client-side scripting. Prior to converting this site to a static webpage hosted on Google's Cloud Platform, I used PHP 5.4 for server-side scripting. I've written all code and content in Vim and Notepad++. For SSH and SFTP access I use Putty and WinSCP respectively.