About Me

My name is Joseph McDonough, and I am a software engineer. I graduated from Marist College with a bachelor's of science in computer science/software development as well as a major in cybersecurity and minors in information systems and information technology. Upon finishing my first-semester senior year in December 2021, I was hired at Concourse Labs. While working and waiting until graduation, I took a semester of master's courses in computer science/software development before stopping to focus solely on work. I worked at Concourse Labs until they were acquired by Fortinet in January 2024, where I worked until they stopped the product in favor of another in July 2024.

With my first professional job being at a startup, I was given the opportunity very early on to explore different facets of a software company. I took a liking to the backend side of things as working with data is much more appealing than finding ways to display it. I tend to prefer the functional aspects of things, as opposed to making them look nice on a user interface. While at Concourse Labs, I gained mainly professional Java experience, as well as some Python and Go. I was able to learn and work with the Spring Boot framework for REST services as well as reactive programming through Mutiny Quarkus in gRPC services. Even picking up things like Bazel and Gradle for a build system. Through my tenure there, I learned so much and got invaluable experience in many different areas that a software product needs to survive. I am confident this knowledge will better prepare me for any future projects due to having a much greater understanding of what is needed on a larger scale. Projects are so much more than one or two repositories strictly with some Java.

Having graduated as a double major, I did not get the opportunity to take any data science classes, which is something I do regret a bit. Statistics and numbers are something that has always fascinated me. Growing up, reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis was one of my biggest inspirations. The idea of using solely statistics and finding value in places that aren't visibly present was incredibly interesting to me. During college, I found motorsport and racing to scratch that itch, as there, every millimeter and every thousandth of a second matter. While all of that is still of interest to me today, I also took Google's Data Analytics Professional Certificate after graduating. Through this course, I learned about data analysis and cleaning, then visualization with R and Tableau. These new skills, enable me to do my passion projects and maybe one day obtain a position where they can be useful.

Despite my still large interest in math and numbers and the temptation of data science, computers and both software development and later cybersecurity took over. My enjoyment of computers came when I discovered Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in 2013. There I made scripts (more like text files to execute single-line console commands) to make my quality of life better in-game. I decided that I kind of liked to do that sort of stuff and would like to explore this side of computers. For high school, I attended Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange, New Jersey, and there I took two computer science courses (AP Java and AP Computer Science Principles). These courses solidified my interest in working with computers and encouraged me to continue my education in the computer science field.

In the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to work at BD for a 12-week internship where I worked on the Product Security Engineering Team in which I got to experience several different aspects of both software development and security practices. This experience further solidified my enjoyment of software development and cybersecurity. The summer of 2021 allowed me to build upon my software development studies. I got the chance to work at Amazon in Seattle, Washington for a finance technology team. There I was able to take a project from a thought to near production. This was my first true experience with seeing a project grow like that. Along the way, I was able to design, document, implement, and test changes, all while working with Amazon Web Services and other internal tools.

Through my limited experiences so far, I find the most enjoyment in working away from the user interface and in the backend side of development. I enjoy working in services that read and write from a database and do something with the data. While I do have collegiate and internship knowledge in many different languages, I also favor those that I have already used in a professional setting. Java and Python are the most comfortable and I feel most confident to meet whatever requirements through them. No matter what though, I am always eager to learn something new and embark on new adventures.

All banner images and photos are my own.