After a year and a half at Penn State, I was preparing to start my two-semester long senior design course. One of the other courses I needed, a field Geology course was very exclusive and I failed to register for it in time before it was completely filled.I decided - to hell with it - and I took a year off unsure if I wanted to come back to my major, as I didn't like it much anyways.

I decided to try and start a business. My business idea was to share DIY projects on a website behind a subscription service and I didn't want to pay for anything and I wanted the opportunity to make it as custom as possible.

As soon as I left my internship which I had in the summer of 2015, I began a course learning HTML and CSS hosted free through EdX.com. I absolutely loved the course and proceeded to create my own website, www.thediyresource.com based on the knowledge I received. I learned PHP from a series on YouTube where the instructor was teaching how to create a login system. I also put together some basic JavaScript knowledge. In the end, my website was complete with a design I loved and had a login system, some calculators, embedded videos, animations, all sorts of stuff.

I was livestreaming my programming on Twitch and I learned just how much of a noob I was. A viewer in my chat pointed out that he could access my admin account because my PHP scripts were sending unhashed passwords to the page when I authenticated my users. I may have not been ready to put this website out there, but I learned a lot from this experience and I'm thankful for it.

During this year off, I quit doing The DIY Resource because I had no customer acquisition. I didn't approach the market right. The Article Initiative though, was an idea I had 'to improve existing content on the internet'. I wanted to create a suite webapps where I assisted users in calculating things, planning, and processing data related to different content on the internet.

For example, I discovered a crockpot recipe blog which my wife and I loved. I created an application to support the blog which took a number of recipes and generated a shopping list based on the recipes you wanted to choose. I actually reached out to the bloggers to see if they wanted to use my app (link it on their blogs). They loved my work and actually contracted me out to try and build a more comprehensive, polished UI to get & print shopping lists. I ended up producing a pretty good application by the end - it just took me too long and they ended up dropping the project.