Coding for Aviation

Coding for Aviation

By Zack Wand

I’m Zack, a software engineer working in the aviation industry by day, and a side project enthusiast by night.

I’ve been writing code since the early age of 9, when my dad taught me how to make a simple computer game. He has been in the computer programming industry since it’s very beginning, and he showed me the light. I immediately fell in love with creating games and have been doing it ever since!

I went to college at University of Illinois to get my computer science degree. While I was there, I created many Flash games in my free time. My most popular game, Mirror Runners, was played over a million times across the world, and earned me over $300!

Since then, in my spare time I’ve developed:

• An iPad app called StageBook, which helps high school teachers coordinate show choir routines. Teachers no longer need to draw out charts on paper of where all of their students should be standing throughout their songs.
• A website for my friends and I to manage our fantasy football leagues and show interesting analytics about who we pick. There may or may not also be a way to trash talk each other through the site.
• An Xbox game! Well, I’m still working on it…

I am currently employed at a small startup in Chicago called Provenair. We are working to help airline companies organize the massive amount of paperwork that gets passed around when airplanes need to swap out old parts.

In some cases, when an airplane is purchased it’s cargo hold needs to get physically loaded up with boxes and these boxes are full of paperwork for the thousands of parts that make up the airplane. Wouldn’t it be much easier if companies were just sent a link to a website to view all of the documentation in an ordered format?

We are building a system that will use machine learning and computer vision to read in and process thousands of documents a day, automatically scanning all of the data off of the documents and into a queryable database. Customers will hire us to save themselves countless man hours currently spent combing through paperwork. Or, of course, it’s quite possible no one wants to use our system and we go bankrupt. That is the fun of a startup! 😄

What tools and languages do I use?

• C#
• JavaScript
• HTML
• SQL