Hello. I'm Levi Pinkard. You already got the basics from the homepage, so I'll skip all of that. Here's what I look like.
Educational Background: I'm from the west side of Indianapolis, born and raised. For high school, I attended Ben Davis High School, and graduated with an Academic and Technical Honors diploma. While in 10th grade, I joined my high school's FIRST FRC robotics team, Team 4580 (Conductors). While competing in FRC put me through some insane stress for that time in my life, it motivated me to really sit down and really learn to program. I had messed around with programming before, made number guessing games, that sort of thing, but I hadn't done anything serious. At that time our team used Java, so that's when I began to learn Java programming. While on team 4580 I met some of my best friends in high school, and I'm very grateful to FIRST for bringing us together. I began attending Purdue in 2019, and left in early 2023 to pursue other ventures.
Personal Life: In May of 2018, I came out as gay. You might have noticed the pride flag favicon on this site. In 2018 I decided I wasn't going to hide anything anymore, and I've tried my best to hold myself to that since. Also, In March of 2020 I recieved my amateur radio license (technician level). My call sign is K9GGF. K9GGF used to belong to my Great Grandfather (Vernon L. Bridges), and I'm proud to help the call sign live on.
Employment History: In February 2020, I got my first job, a part-time job at Starship Technologies, working as a robot operator and field technician. I ended up doing closings most nights. Cleaning robots mainly, and also just making sure everything is in order for the end of the night. My employment did not continue after being furloughed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Notable Achievements: In January 2020, my team and I won the Ecolab water conservation challenge at the BoilerMake VII hackathon. The details on our hack can be found here. On this project, I was responsible for the sensor hardware, along with the backend server hardware (sensor data was sent via an Arduino with a BLE module added, the backend (written by my teammate and friend Mitchell Augustin) ran on a Raspberry Pi that I configured to interface with the sensor data)
Here's a picture of my team during the event, I'm the second from the left, in the hoodie. My other team members are Mitchell, Kai, and Sabrina.
