Introducing Zachary Taylor

This is me at the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL,
 overlooking the 2020 Mars rover as it is being assembled.

Hi there, I'm Zach, a graduating senior computer science major at Trinity. I'll be working for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory starting in June, so I'm excited to get some exposure to Maker culture before diving head-first into a land populated by engineers. As a software engineer by trade, most of the things I've created aren't physical, tangible things, per se, so I look forward to mixing that up a bit by taking this class.









Perhaps the coolest thing I'm working on that I can actually show in images is my thesis, which consists of sub-classifying ancient coins based on the tool that was used to strike them. We use various computer-vision methods to extract identifying features from coin images, then match them to others.

I actually used to make things more frequently before I started programming, and it wasn't until I got my first Arduino that I stopped making things and started focusing solely on code. Here's a picture of a Tesla coil (or Slayer Exciter, if we're going to be technical about it) I made early in high school.

In a way, I'd like this class to help me get back in touch with the tinkering/making side of tech. Before I learned to code, I was doing things like the image on the left - not particularly useful, but certainly cool. Now that I'm going to be working in aerospace, I have an opportunity to work on projects that demand the Maker mentality - and I want to be up to the challenge!