Hello. I’m a student currently attending Kansas State University for Computer Science. I grew up in a medium sized town just outside of Kansas City, Kansas. My high school was a good mix of both rural and urban people. I was on my high school’s cross country team and am still a runner to this day. I spent a year on my school’s mass media team, helping shoot the morning announcements and sometimes being an anchor on them.
My family consists of two older brothers, a younger sister, my parents, and a lot of other relatives who live in Montana. Because of this, we end up visiting Montana most summers and last summer on our way back, we stopped in Colorado to spend a day hiking in the mountains which was amazing.
I first got into computer science in middle school, mainly because I wanted to make video games. Ever since I learned to code I’ve been programming games. I started out using Scratch when I was twelve years old and have now been using Java for about three years. I know a little bit about coding in Basic and tried to use C++ once but decided to just stick with Java for the time being. I haven’t released any games yet but I just joined the KSU game development club and am hoping to eventually get into the industry professionally. The best case scenario would be that I start my own game development company and it takes the world by storm. I think that I would probably be fine with working for another game development company, but it would have to be the right one because I’ve heard lots of stories about horrible working conditions, long hours, and low pay in that particular part of the computer science industry. In case you’re wondering, my top three games would probably have to be, in no particular order: Fez, Street Fighter, and Megaman X.
I’m currently living with my brother and another unrelated housemate while I attend college. As luck would have it, the unrelated housemate and I share the same first name which is a little confusing at times, I won’t be revealing what that name is here, however.
I get most of my technology related news from either https://m.reddit.com/ or http://www.cnet.com/. Specifically, I’m subscribed to r/programming, r/gadgets, and r/technology on reddit. I really like reddit because the articles come from differing news outlets and are ranked and given their order of appearance based entirely on user ratings, rather than their priority being decided solely by an algorithm.
The book we are reading for class is W Daniel Hillis’s The Pattern on the Stone and what I’ve read of it so far has been pretty interesting. Looking at the table of contents, I would have to say that the two chapters I am looking forward to the most would have to be Chapter 5: Algorithms and Heuristics, and Chapter 8: Computers that Learn and Adapt. Chapter 5 seems interesting to me because new algorithms can revolutionize computer science. Algorithms are at the core of the kind of problem solving that makes programming fun for me. Chapter 8 sounds interesting to me because it sounds like it’s about artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence has such a vast number of applications once it’s advanced enough. Imagine being able to delegate any task to a machine that a human could do, except that the machine gets it done much faster, much more efficiently, and with much less complaining, plus there’s the added bonus of the machine being able to exist in many more places than a human ranging from the vacuum of outer space to a completely virtual environment.
I guess that about wraps it up for this post. I’m really looking forward to computer science this year.
