Taylor 0:01

Okay, so that is transcribing and we can start talking so can you introduce yourself say your name major in year to start

 

Jacob 0:12

so my name is Jacob Amin I'm a fourth year computational media student studying people are my concentrations are people and interaction design is the last part I forgot. You said

 

Taylor 0:25

you go, yeah, I am also a cm major respect. Can you also tell me just like about some of your interests, hobbies, stuff? Like that?

 

Jacob 0:36

Yeah, so as far as I guess, like academic related hobbies, I'm super into web development. I am an ofcer in the web development club. I lead projects over there and then also just on a more fun note. I'm super into like long distance running and I want to get into like triathlons and like doing an Ironman at some point. So yeah, what's an Ironman? And Ironman is like, it's like, a hardcore triathlon. I don't know what I think it's like running a marathon and then like biking, miles and swimming, but like, yeah, that's a long way away.

 

Taylor 1:06

Good for you. Yeah, that's hard. Yeah. All right. So why did you originally join empathy bytes?

 

Jacob 1:13

So I originally joined empathy bytes. It's funny. I've been a part of another VIP before I was a part of design blog for one semester, but I actually originally wanted to join empathy bytes, but it was full this semester. I tried to join. But then I guess Luckily, my other VIP theyweren't offering it that next semester, so I got to join in with the bytes. But yeah, I originally wanted to join it because for one I'm interested in web development. And to I've heard from previous students that it's like, it's a it's a good VIP, and you get to learn about interesting stuff, especially like, you know, interviewing all these communities, you're on campus that you would normally not think of, but yeah, that's kind of how I found it. And you know, now this is my second year in the VIP, and I think I'm liking it even more and more.

 

Taylor 1:55

It all works out. Yeah. So what are some reasons that you love empathy bites, and you continue to work and empathy bites?

 

Jacob 2:03

Yeah, I think my favorite part about empathy bites is how freeform it is we kind of have like it student run teams. So we have a lot more freedom to actually explore things that we're interested in and kind of make cool things that aren't really I guess, constrained by what the professor like different rules that we have to follow. I mean, for certain, there's some rules that we have to follow, especially with like web development, like you know, like an article page or like if you're presenting information it has to follow certain standards, but we're going to experiment a lot more too with it. One thing that I'm super interested in this 3d web development, like 3js developing 3d models and all that kind of stuff. And I'm actually getting to implement some stuff from the emerging tech team into the website, which I think is really cool. And I think that probably would have been hard to do if we had like, a big constraint, like what we can actually do on the website. But yeah, I think the freedom is probably my favorite part and what makes me like it, you know, even though

Taylor 2:53

so you mentioned that this is your second year. So is how many semesters is that

 

Jacob 2:59

so far? No. two semesters second semester? Yeah, two semesters. Yeah,

 

Taylor 3:03

gotcha. So what work have you done in these past semesters?

 

Jacob 3:08

So it's pretty much all been web development work. I thought, ya know, pretty much I'll do a lot of development. Last semester. We worked a lot with WordPress and this JavaScript framework called Gatsby, which is basically just React except some add ons on it that make it pretty nice to use. Um, so that was last semester, I worked a lot more on the database side and a lot more in the back end, which is something I'm not super familiar with. I mean, like being a cmhr. I'm much more focused on like design and front end and like web design,that kind of thing. But I got to work a lot more on backend which is cool making calls to the database and pulling data, you know, being able to create a web page pulling data from a database, but yeah, that was last semester and then this semester, we switched our backend to be Drupal, which is a it's a cool database. I've used it before in industry, then my last internship we were using Drupal. So it's fun to get to use that and kind of teach everyone else in the team about Drupal I think it's I feel like Drupal has some good foothold like at least in industry, it's probably something that you're more frequently gonna see them WordPress. So yeah, I kind of forgot what the question was. What I've been doing, right.

 

Taylor 4:15

Yeah. What are you doing right now?

 

Jacob 4:17

Yeah. So I mean, at least right now. Yeah. So I'm leading the web team. So a lot of it is kind of organizing things and assigning work to people making sure I kind of have an idea of what the big picture is gonna be and then helping people with the fne details. So the most interesting thing that I'm working on now is being able to implement 3d web to the website, which I think is super cool. So yeah, getting to import models and have like model viewers and stuff on the site. That's probably my favorite thing I'm working on right now. But it is also nice to see everything come together and now as the semester is closing, like I think we have a really good fnished product that we can show to external audiences and really present our research.

 

Taylor 4:57

How do you think our collaboration this semester has impacted the work we've done?

Versus past semesters?

 

Jacob 5:06

And collaborations in between teams? Yes. Okay. Cool. Yeah, I think this semester, we have been better in the past about collaborating with teams. I know we have frequent meetings with all the team leads, and we're kind of discussing about how, like, we can have our projects integrated and be more interconnected, which I think is a great thing. I know for our for example, I guess with the website, we're actually we're implementing models from the emerging tech team. We're implementing, you know, interviews, stuff like that stuff we're doing right now. And also just like a bunch of information about the app team like mock ups and all that stuff. So it feels a lot more connected than I think it did last semester for me, which is a good thing and I hope that continues into the future and we can make even more cool things.

 

Taylor 5:46

Great. Sorry. So you mentioned Drupal. How is that kind of different from the past ones we've worked with such as WordPress.

 

Jacob 6:04

So WordPress, it's interesting. So I think WordPress is the choice of like content management system that we use since like the start of empathy bytes. I knew a lot of the content on their resume years ago. So that it was it was somewhat dated. There were a lot of like updates that had to do in the WordPress site. And just like things were a little bit all over the place. I think documentation cut offs between years and it was just like we didn't really know what was going on. So it is nice to get a fresh start with Drupal. And Drupal actually allows for like a lot more freedom and I think it's a lot easier to actually implement data from perspective of not being technical people can implement and they can make webpages without like having to actually code and I think Drupal is interfaces easier than WordPress for that. So that's really cool. And there's also just a lot of things that you can do with Drupal. A lot of different kinds. You have a lot more freedom about what content types you can make. You can make custom content types and then send that to the website. overall Yeah, it's just a lot more freedom and it's good to start fresh and we can make very clean documentation and very simple things so it can you know, have longevity, I guess it did an excellent series.

 

Taylor 7:52

why is it I'll let you Why is it so important that these platforms that CS people are using ensure that it is accessible for people to use and implement what they want to even if it isn't the super CS side when they are working on these big projects? If that makes sense. I can clarify if you need me to. That was a big question.

 

Jacob 8:21

I think there's two parts I guess that I'm thinking of that question in terms of like accessibility with like disability accessibility was one thing and then also just making interfaces and stuff like that easy to use.

 

Taylor 8:31

I meant the like, interface kind of side. Yeah, yeah.

 

Jacob 8:34

So I think it's, it's kind of interesting, one of the reasons why I wanted to study computer science and wanted to study I guess, computational media as well. Is I don't know something that my dad always told me growing up is like, the worst bug that you could possibly have. Or the worst issue you could have is like an issue with software because it's just so hard to use. And it's like so complicated. So I guess it kind of like put me on this journey where I want to make software and things easy to use, and I want them to be intuitive and I want them to make sense because the most frustrating thing is to like look at something and have no clue what's happening and then just like not clear what you're supposed to do. So yeah, I think it's defnitely very important and I'm really, really glad that the focus of this semester is more on making it easier for other people who are not familiar with like coding or familiar with like what we're doing it's just really easy. To seamlessly come in and make content. So yeah, I'm glad it's a big focus, something that we're working on. Yeah.

 

Taylor 9:30

Yeah, just personal thought. Do you feel like Drupal is similar? To how Canva and fgma work if you're familiar with that, how it's kind of like, here's the template and how can you like add on,

 

Jacob 9:44

it's pretty much exactly like that , it's like there's like a box like you have different boxes that you can employ. It's basically just like typing in and everything will be styled and like pushed towards the website by a click of a button. You don't have to like do anything. So that's really cool. Yeah.

 

Taylor 9:59

So what is like your favorite development you've made so far this semester? I know like Drupal has been a big thing, but if there's something really specifc you have in mind,

 

Jacob 10:10

um, yeah, Drupal. is defnitely been big. I think also another thing that's kind of a bit more boring, I guess, in terms of like, not something cool that you could show to everyone. But we fnally fgured out a good way to manage and like organize all our style sheets for our website. I know in the past it was, I guess in the past last semester, it was kind of just like sticking things in there. But now we have a very like I guess organized is the right word or very like concrete way, okay, we're going to have something named this. It's going to be named this it's going to have these things in it. It's going to import something from here, and it's all very consistent, which I think makes it a lot easier. And it makes it a lot easier for people on the web to the web track team to actually I guess learn how things would look. A lot of people in the team are like learning web dev, they're not like super, I guess, like engrossed in it. But I think that helps a lot. But I think in terms of like the coolest thing that's like outward facing that people will see on the website is defnitely the 3d stuff, which I know is I mentioned a lot. But yeah, it's it's really cool to get to load models and stuff in 3d on the website. And I know talking with the emerging tech team, they always have all these cool things in the archives and it'd be great to share them on the website.

 

Taylor 11:18

Is there any big challenges you face this semester?

 

Jacob 11:23

Hmm. Big challenges. Well, I mean, I'm talking about how great Drupal is. Yeah. But there defnitely is a learning curve to using it. I know that tutorials and like a lot of the things that we're following are things made in 2019 2018. It's a little bit old. So things have changed, but yeah, there is there was some confusion about that the beginning of the semester. And I guess one issue that we're still facing, which we've pretty much fgured out actually is we're trying to move a lot of like audio transcripts, a lot of media content like video from WordPress into Drupal, and then from Drupal into our like our front end of the site. And there's been some issues with that just I think it was that we didn't have a full understanding of how Drupal worked and like pulling data from it, but we do understand it now. So that stuff will be on the website. But that's one thing that we were, I guess working on the past few weeks.

 

Taylor 12:11

Do you feel like these challenges will push you to be a better CS person design person in like the workplace in the future?

 

Jacob 12:21

I think defnitely. I think one thing I mentioned before was that we have a lot more freedom in this project. So our Ellison does not like I don't wanna say not a hands on as she is but it's like it's it's more like we have the freedom to do what we want. So when we are working on things that we had the freedom to do, it's our job to solve the issues. It's our job to really go in and do the problem solving there. I think is a really helpful industry skill to be able to look at something even if you don't have a full understanding of it at frst and really be able to do your research you know, and fgure it out it by bit and solve problems by yourself without the need of much external help. I think it's a great quality to have in the workforce. And that's kind of what we're doing now too so

 

Taylor 13:02

so we just touched on how this VIP would impact you in like the future in the industry. world.

But how do you feel that empathy bytes has impacted you academically and socially.

 

Jacob 13:18

So yeah, that is a funny thing, because I know this is a development that's happened a bit more like this semester, but I think I don't know something about the web team this semester. We're a lot more social with each other and we're like, oh, wait, like I don't know the meetings feel a lot. Like, it doesn't feel like a meeting. I guess it feels more like it's a gathering of people working on things that are cool together. Which I think is really cool. And it's it's also just cool to meet people too. There's some cm majors, some CS majors, some people from Georgia, some people not from Georgia, so I don't know it's just cool to get to talk with people from all these different backgrounds. That's socially and then I think academically it's, it's, it's also pretty cool to be able to do a project like this for credit and be able to explore things that you want to learn and explore things that are a lot more, I guess, career relevant or industry relevant than you would get in another class. We're working specifcally on tools that are used within industry and I feel like oftentimes in CS classes and stuff like that, that's not the case you use a lot of like data technologies, or it's kind of just like, I don't know how this is really going to be helpful in industry. I guess I can name a lot of classes that are like that. I've taken in the past but I think yeah, socially. It's cool to meet people from all over the place. A lot of people are I guess, drawn to this project. And academically, you getting to learn things that are like industry standard and things you could actually use in your, I guess future career after school.

 

Taylor 14:33

Nice. So, you mentioned that this is now your third semester Right?

 

Jacob 14:37

Or second semester of empathy bites, but Okay, yeah.

 

Taylor 14:41

So will you be returning next semester?

 

Jacob 14:44

So I'm actually graduating Okay. Wasn't sure Yeah.

 

Taylor 14:47

Okay. Since you are not returning. What are some things you want to see in the future for empathy bytes?

 

Jacob 14:54

I think one thing, or at least I'm guessing, speaking more towards the web track, but one thing that I think this B IP emphasizes using cutting edge and new technologies. So now that we kind of have the groundwork set for what our website should be, and kind of the standard stuff that like the website should include, I hope in the future people on the web team, and I guess just every team really kind of explore these experimental technologies. And explore these new things and see what cool things you could do on the website. So more experimentation and things like that.

 

Taylor 15:25

Gotcha. So that is kind of my last question, but do you have any parting words anything you would like to stress about this VIP?

 

Jacob 15:36

Um, I don't know. I think I guess like the main thing. I think the best thing about this VIP is the freedom that you have to you know, like, explore and kind of you have like, a set of guidelines you need to follow on work that you need to do, but you really can explore and work on things that interests you, which I think is great. So that's, I guess what I would want to emphasize and if anyone's interested in joining like, that's a big thing. This VIP.

 

Taylor 15:58

Gotcha. So that is our interview then. It's cool, cool. Cool.