About Me
Student life
I am a Junior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute pursuing a B.S. in Computer & Systems Engineering. It has certainly been an interesting experience with plenty of opportunities I never would have anticipated. I’m itching to get out into the world and build real things, though.
Professional life
Since the beginning of high school, I have been applying my computer talents with programming and administration to real-world problems. In the summer of 2008 I interned at Wesabe. From summer 2006 through summer 2007 I worked for a small startup in Silicon Valley developing hospital scheduling software. In the summer of 2005, I applied my network administration and Linux abilities to setting up and maintaining a network for a small corporation. In the summer of 2004, I built a Java Struts-based website for a client. In the summer of 2003, I built an automated candle dipping machine with some mechanical help from my father.
Programming
Let’s face it: I like to code! I really enjoy programming and creating something from nothing. It’s the ultimate game for me. Games get boring because they have limits. Programming has no limits!
The first language I learned was C++. It was at CyberCamps at Santa Clara University, just down the street from my house. I honestly can’t recommend the camp, but at least it got me started. After that, I spent a summer teaching myself Java. Java was fun for a while, but I didn’t stop there. I threw in HTML for good measure and a little JavaScript. Then it was on to PHP. I went back to assembly for a microcontroller project I did. From there, I wrote a Palm app in C that I ported to C++ for the object-oriented goodies. I’ve experimented with interesting languages like Haskell and Lisp, but haven’t done anything useful in them. Java is definitely my native language.
Having spent two summers (and much of the time in the interim) developing in pure Java, I can safely say that my strongest competency is there. I’m now quite familiar with a good portion of the vast Java library, from Swing to Tomcat, and I’ve learned to cope with the language’s deficiencies. It’s a solid language with tons of support and libraries out there.
While Java can be great for some things, Ruby is my new favorite language. It is expressive, easy, and flexible. Ruby doesn’t get in my way. Ruby lets me express what I’m thinking without even trying. Ruby is a wonderful language, and I hope to write as much code as possible in it in the future!