Me, myself, and I

I have always been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. I still have vague memories of watching videos of the humanoid Honda ASIMO robot in awe, back when I was in elementary school, wondering how it worked. I tried to attend a few classes on "coding", but I didn't gain as much from them as I would have liked, mainly because... I can't think of any other way to say this... they were boring. So many programs exist to try and teach middle schools to use scratch or python, claiming that "coding is easy!", and "anyone can write code!", but they couldn't be further from the truth. Following instructions to make a program that says "Hello World" is easy, but it doesn't teach you anything and doesn't provide any form of an interesting result. Now, I'm not saying that all programming classes are fundamentally flawed - there are quite a few that I have since attended that were quite informative - but nothing like that was available to me at the time. The problem with following instructions when you first start programming is that there are no problems. Since you're following instructions that have already been tried and tested, you know that everything will work properly. There is no design process - testing, problem solving, and finding solutions are all skipped over. So while I did know the basics of python in middle school, I didn't make anything with it. It seemed pointless to me.

I got my first Android device (The Great Samsung Galaxy S2) when I was 13, and started making my first app on it a little over a year later. Because I was a lazy idiot, my first few projects consisted entirely of a WebView linked to a Google Sites page, but I quickly realized the limitations of this method. During the summer break of 2015, I spent hours every day scouring Stack Overflow for examples of how make an android app perform various tasks. This was especially difficult as I had no prior knowledge of the Java language and I'm pretty sure that I didn't even know I was writing Java for the first couple months. My first project was a basic app that took a paragraph as input, and make it 'bigger' by replacing words with longer phrases and/or doubling the amount of spaces between words and sentences in the document. It wasn't long after I finished this that I got my Google Play account and started working on a new app to display a collection of wallpapers made by people I had met on Google Plus.

That app has since been unpublished because it was a complete abomination with the worst code style I have ever seen in my life, and is currently collecting dust at the bottom of my GitHub profile. While making it, however, I managed to improve the app's UX a great deal and learnt a lot about consumer-focused design, making the app's functionality both easy for new users to understand and fast enough for existing users to navigate without feeling like they're wasting time.

Well, that's about all I can think of for an informal description of myself. Ever since I learnt to make Android apps, I've been bouncing around between lots of different types of projects. Some are intended for regular consumers, some for people obsessed with customization, and even a few for other developers like me.

I am currently in my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh trying to figure out what on earth I want to do with my life. That said, I'm still hopelessly addicted to programming, and will keep making anything and everything I can think of in my free time.