I've worked for Corepoint Health as a Software Engineer since January 2010. Their flagship product is a healthcare integration engine which manages HL7 message interaction between endpoint applications. The company treats their employees great and their customers even better, earning the KLAS #1 ranking for their market in 2009.
Internship
I began my career with Raytheon as a Senior Tech Student (Intern) on the Joint Environmental Toolkit (JET) project, which was an Air Force contract. I was on the front end team working primarily with Struts JSTL and javascript. I didn't design much of my own work on this program but fixed a lot of DR's and learned a lot about the software development process. I even got to dabble in writing requirements, documentation, and integration testing.
AWIPS
In December 2008 I finally finished my B.S. in Computer Science and Raytheon decided to hire me on full time as a Software Engineer I. My first assignment was the AWIPS II program, which is a black box re-design of the existing AWIPS software in use at every National Weather Service forecast office. My tasks in the beginning were varied: from writing decoders for textual weather products to working on the storage mechanism of certain product types to overlaying products on the display.
WarnGen
The most important software project have worked on thus far in my career has been WarnGen. This software issues all short duration severe weather warnings, containing intricate details about the storm and the affected geographic areas in a format that can be quickly interpreted by weather radios across the area. These warnings also trigger the alert system (sirens) that warn you to get in the basement when a tornado is coming. Luckily, the national weather service releases a lot of screenshots from this software!
TD Ameritrade
After 5 years of working in fast food at the Great Steak & Potato Company I visited the career resource center as a freshman at the University of Nebraska. Dr. Doug Bahle had a career mailing list which all of the IT companies in the area seemed to support. Nearly every day a new email was sent containing 1-3 job postings for various levels of co-ops, internships, and entry level positions. Through this resource I came in contact with Ameritrade (now TD Ameritrade).
My responsibilities at TD Ameritrade were varied but all had to do with Operations. I was upset at first that I wasn't going to be doing hands on programming, but I learned a lot about the availability aspect of a financial website through this position. My core duty was to produce a daily report detailing and system degradation or outage of the previous day so that it could be relayed to the different sectional managers of the company. Part of the investigation involved communicating with software developers, managers, IT folks, and an occasional vendor.
I enjoyed my time with Ameritrade but they didn't have any coding co-ops available at the time so after about a year of employment I asked my friends to help me out. One of my buddies since high school, Ross Bell, had a gig at Union Pacific and he got me an interview so I could get my foot in the door.
Union Pacific
The job at Union Pacific was my first experience working downtown. I was on the 13th floor of a large downtown building and it felt great to have all the restaurants and entertainment in close proximity to my work. UP had a great cafeteria and I was friends with a lot of my coworkers, including 4 other interns in my department.
My duties with the company were that of a general web developer maintaining systems and creating basic reports. The work was not glamorous but it was good to get experience with Coldfusion, Microsoft SQL server, and the corporate grind. I wrote a ton of SQL and javascript, whhich I previously had little experience with, so this job made some of my college classes a joke.
Peter Kiewit Institute
During my junior year I was excelling in my Theory of Computation and Automata, Computability, and Formal Languages classes so I happened upon two offers that made me resign from Union Pacific. The first was a tutoring position for Theory of Comp. I loved this job. The pay wasn't great but I felt like I was able to put my purely academic knowledge to good use. I can report with sadness that I haven't used any of my automata knowledge since that tutoring post. The student I was helping saw a marked improvement in his grade and he wrote a very kind letter to the faculty of PKI thanking me for my cooperation. Despite being but a blip on the radar of my employment this has been one of my proudest accomplishments.
My other opportunity was on a research project with Victor Winter and a Ph.d student, Azamat, on a project for Sandia National Laboratories. The project was based on using automated program transformation to remove certain features from java libraries. During my time on the project we had focused on the java.lang and java.util packages. I was only on this project for a short time before I accepted an offer with Raytheon, and my simultaneous work as a tutor overshadowed much of my work on the program.