Weekly Project Post — Week 12

Orion Haunstrup

August 13th

Professional Development

Final Project Report

What I Did This Week:

Where last week I completed the final draft of the home page of my professional portfolio website — orionhaunstrup.com —, this week I dove in deeply and completed the final drafts of each of the 4 sub-pages for the 4 smaller projects contained therein. Some of these were easier and mostly involved writing titles and paragraphs and moving images around to satisfaction, some sections were much more technically complex and involved learning lots of new Wix capabilites:

The NFL Project sub-page was near complete. This was the easiest of the pages to finish up. I mostly polished the writing and rearranged the imagery.

The Random Trees sub-page was an extensive job. This was primarily due to the fact that I sought a way to have the page demonstrate the little exploring random trees rather than just talk about them. I dreamed up the idea of having the center of the webpage still have expository text, but along the edges have small looping GIFs of the random trees in action. This was a lovely idea, but the ‘how’ of how that would actually be done, technologically, was a total hail mary pass. At first I didn’t even know if this would be possible! But some careful research later, I managed to find a way of converting the still images I had on file of some of my favorite runs of the Rapidly Exploring Random Trees python code into a .zip file. This I then had to find a way to crop the white boarders off of (also a difficult challenge). And then finally I was able to convert those into GIFs and place them around the page. Frankly I’m thrilled at how this page turned out! I’m so glad I was able to find a way to make this work.

The N-Units Away Curves page needed fairly extensive attention as well. I’m a little embarrassed that I had not yet posted the actual mathematics paper to the website yet. Forgive me if this leaves too little time to peruse it and enjoy. That being said, I had the difficult question of how to let the users interact with this mathematics paper. The easiest solution would have been to simply have a download link connecting the reader to the associated .pdf file. This seemed a little drab and seemed much more likely to get the reader to tune out and not engage. Another option would have been to post each of the 37 pages of dense mathematics all directly onto the website. This, again, seemed more likely to overwhelm and under-impress the audience. Instead of either of these simpler choices, I chose to do something more cutting edge. To quote the great Garrison Keillor “You’ve gotta put the hay where the goats can get it.” I decided to see if there was any way to display the mathematics paper in an interactive way on the website. Some kind of a clickable slideshow that the user could navigate once on the site. Fairly extensive research on the topic led me to some obscure, dusty resources on the advanced side of using Wix. I was able to download a special contained-within-Wix app, upload that capability to my site, activate it, and then upload my mathematics paper inside of it! In so doing, I was able to achieve just what I’d hoped for. I’m very proud of this one.

The last part was the Collatz Research section. Interestingly while this portion was far less technologically difficult, I found it to be fairly tricky as well. Collatz Research really is my life’s work. It has been the beating heart of my dreams, goals, and passion as a practicing mathematician for over a decade now. I had a choice. Option 1 was to display the front page leading the user over to my other website — collatzresearch.org — in an involved, complex fashion filled with graphs and diagrams, videos perhaps even. … But this seemed to perhaps almost work against my intentions. The math problem itself is so wild and colorful and involved, and that separate site is so flashy, it seemed like a gentle understated approach might be wiser. Option 2 was to quietly and humbly offer my work in a simple paragraph with a link. I was very deeply torn between these two choices and did a lot of soul searching on the matter. With some difficulty (I’m still not positive I made the right choice), I decided to opt for option 2.

With those sub-pages complete, I finished the last of the work on this portfolio website for the semester!

What I Did This Semester:

In the very start of the course, I was quite surprised by the format of the course. I expected something somewhat structured, basic lessons of some kind. Especially since I had already decided to career pivot towards data engineering instead of software development, I was quite concerned that I might find the course tedious and or perhaps not particularly helpful towards my future. When I learned that instead the course was actually very wide open and had almost a “do a project that will benefit your career” mindset, this left open the whole world to choose from!

I decided to embark upon a journey that would have great personal meaning and significance towards my future career. I’ve always known that it would be essential, at some point, to assemble a good number of my various creative projects into a nice portfolio for future employers. I certainly have done some cool and interesting projects in various fields related to the kinds of jobs I’ll be applying to, but at the start of the course all I really had to show of those was the statement that I had done so, buried somewhere on my resume. That wasn’t going to impress anyone. I plan on primarily deeply job applying in the fall of 2027 (hoping to find a job after graduation come the start of 2028), and so I had intended on building a nice portfolio website somewhere during the summer of 2027.

That being said, I was absolutely thrilled to be able to get a massive head start on this portfolio and dedicate this entire class’s efforts towards that goal. This would let me take much more time for the endeavor and pour in a lot more heart and soul into making it truly as good-quality as I could. I’m so utterly grateful to have had this opportunity.

My project for this class was to construct a very reasonable working draft of my professional portfolio that I could use to show to future employers (and possibly research collaborators!) the kinds of projects that I have been working on. Ultimately the final final draft of this needs to be done by the end of summer 2027, so I do have a good deal of time to do the final polishing as time goes by. But I cannot even put into words how good it feels to be starting that journey (shortly before job applying) with a mostly done very nice fully-functioning draft, rather than starting from scratch.

My portfolio website has the basic necessities of course — a title, an intro, an About Me page (offering contact info and a resume/CV). But really, the core of the portfolio is the 4 projects contained therein. My work for this class was a little ambitious as the goal was to not only construct the nice website to house those projects but was to fully rebuild, redesign, and rework those four projects to completion. I’m, again, so so thrilled to have had significant time (and the motivation boost of this course!) to log in such dedicated undistracted time towards this effort.

The final result is truly everything I set out for. I love the main homepage (although I’m not 100% set in stone that the final version will look just like this. I imagine it will evolve a little over time, with various versions yet to come). I really like how the sub-pages turned out and their artistic variety. I tried very hard to make sure that they weren’t monotone and all the same, artistically. Hopefully the final site is user-friendly and engaging, fun and welcoming, whilst also maintaining a professional enough tone.

One thing that gives me confidence going forward is I have a number of friends who are further in their careers who have mentioned a willingness to examine my site (now that a strong draft of it is done!) and give me constructive feedback. I imagine the version after those changes will be even better.

Things To Be Continued After The Course Is Complete:

While I feel pretty confident that the website is complete, some of the various sub-projects within could still use a little more love.

The primary weakness of the site as it stands is I just didn’t have the time to do a full re-write of the N-Units Away Curves mathematics paper in beautiful polished Latex. That was a very complicated mathematics research topic, and diving all the way back in to not only convert the proofs to nice Latex formatting, but also to rewrite the proofs to be as good mathematically as I can make them… will certainly have to be a project for summer 2027. That’s at least a week of work. And it seemed, at the moment, to be work done in the wrong direction. This class’s goal was to get the website up and running. I can worry about making the formal mathematics proofs a little more well-written at a later date.

I never got the chance to go back through the full Collatz Research website and make it all cell-phone compatible. Frankly, that whole website (upon closer inspection) is probably still not quite quite complete. I’ll give it a final draft too someday. But for the moment, giving it a dedicated link from the portfolio site was really all that needed to be done. It is important to note, however, that for the time being I’m now paying the full monthly price to support and maintain two different websites. Some day I’ll need to full move collatzresearch.org to become merely a sub-page of orionhaunstrup.com, to save me that extra charge each month. But again, that’s the kind of thing I can do on my own time when I get the chance.

I’d love to go through the full details of the portfolio site and make sure that it too is also nicely cell phone compatible. I’ll do this as soon as I get the chance.

And lastly, I’d love (of course) to update my resume/CV to a more up-to-date version before doing any real job applying. I’d like the version on my website to match the version I’ll be handing in to employers.

Discussion / Reflection:

As I said already, I’m just so deeply moved and thrilled and grateful to have had this opportunity. Summer 2027 is going to be a major time for me of working super hard at my jobs (to save money for the great job applying push in Fall 2027), so having this remarkable unexpected head start on this huge personal portfolio website couldn’t have possibly been any more helpful! Especially since I’m hoping to use that same Summer 2027 to deeply study and master various software development / coding interview questions and be as truly ready as I can be when the time comes.

I always enjoy learning new things and gosh, I learned so much over the course of this project. From Wix web-design, to everything about which fonts are trendy right now in the 2026 professional setting… This project was a fascinating and very unique course, and I’ve learned an absolute ton of new things over the course of it.

I’m very excited to now have a snazzy looking portfolio to show whoever is interested in my future! And this class is largely to thank for that. Having a fully working version of my professional portfolio is not only helpful on a practical level, but is a wonderful little confidence boost as I face the fairly daunting 2026 job market. It’s tough out there, but I feel all the better, truly truly, for having taken this course.

The final link to my website:

orionhaunstrup.com

To Professor Guinn,

Thank you truly so so much for this course.

It has been so helpful and has meant the world to me.

Thank you for all your help, encouragement, and

the opportunity to get a big head start towards my future.

Sincerely,

-Orion