Original published date: February 21st, 2019
FIU’s School of Computing and Information Sciences alumni, Luis Irizarry, moved to Miami, Fl in 2007 from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He graduated in the Fall of 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. After graduation, Luis worked as a software engineer for several years at Emphasys Software, Florida Power & Light and Criteo. Luis has always dreamed of building his own tech company while he was working at several for these different companies.
In March of last year, after much planning, Luis decided to quit his job to start freelancing from home. Luis spends the majority of his time freelancing and the rest of the time he is working on his side project Squadflick, which is now on Kickstarter.
He has Reached his goal on Kickstarter!
Squadflick helps groups & couples agree on a movie to watch in just seconds. It solves the difficulty inherent in agreeing on a movie to watch during a movie night. Movie nights are notorious for being plagued by indecision as to finding a movie to watch. Through his entrepreneur journey, he was surprised by how much people are willing to help by just asking.
#FIUSCIS was Luis’s starting point for his love of programming. There were many concepts that he learned during his time at FIU which he continues to use daily such as, programming best practices, database schemas, the importance of code indentation, thanks to Dr. Mark Weiss, among others.
“For those starting out, LEARN as much as you can from each job. Be a sponge and absorb as much knowledge as you can from each person in your environment. Remember, most of these people have been doing their job for years, so you can learn things from everybody, whether it be skilled in programming, communication, artificial intelligence, accounting, etc. Each one of those skills will probably come useful at some point.
~ Luis Irizarry