An Introduction

COVID-19 has brought the world to a crawl, and as I prepare to graduate, I find myself with a surprising amount of free time on my hands. I have been busy enough with a handful of quarantine resolutions (much more effective than new year’s resolutions) such as running, learning Swim to the Moon on my guitar, and applying to as many jobs as I can in one day. Still, I would like to keep my programming skills up to par, and sometimes Leetcode just doesn’t fill that itch.

I have decided to start blogging about various topics that interest me. Those who knew me in university know that given an expo marker and whiteboard, I will find any and every excuse to give a (strongly opinionated) talk/lecture. This blog will be my whiteboard, and with time, I can hopefully develop my caffeine fueled late night laboratory rants into something slightly more eloquent.

Who am I?

I guess it’s time to actually talk about who I am. I’m Rory, a 24 year old student of both computer science and mathematics at Western Washington University. At the time of writing this, I have finished all of my required coursework for both degrees, and am finishing up a general education credit required for graduation.

I have been programming for just over ten years now, starting with small games in Adobe Flash written in ActionScript and Minecraft mods written in Java. Some time roughly five years ago, I realized that I loved studying and learning various programming languages, and pride myself in knowing some amount of roughly 20 programming languages (though mileage may vary on these). In addition to learning programming languages, I have focused on studying programming language design and compilers in university, and took part in developing a research language, Muze, at WWU.

Two years ago, I found a love of proofs and pure math, and decided to add my second major. I have focused my studies in math on more traditional subjects, such abstract algebra, analysis, combinatorics, and optimization. Ultimately, I hope to one day find some happy middle ground of computer science and math to focus my work, since I enjoy working with both so much.

What will I be writing about?

I expect to write about a variety of topics that interest me. Mostly, I will stick to programming languages (and how to break/abuse them), compiler internals, and automata (I love automata). I also would like to start a large project at some point, and will likely write updates on this blog for that project.

Occasionally, I might write about smaller projects that I take up, or even branch out of computer science and math to talk about music (another passion of mine).

Well, that’s it

I look forward to writing more here, and I hope that this turns into something positive!