Blog Entry #0: Help Me Help You

Help me help you: my name and picture are in my profile. You know what I mean.

So there I was: sitting at my New Student Conference, listening to some joker introduce himself as a sixth-year senior, thinking, "That'll never be me!" And now here I am, on my twelfth and final semester, God willing. In five months I plan to commission into the Army, graduate with a B.S. in Computer Science, and marry my beautiful fiancée, Erin:

And now for a guided stream-of-consciousness exercise...

My computing interests seem to be converging to a focus on people as I continue with my education. I'm into AI, web design and development, consulting, and most recently HCI. If you know me, however, you know that my interests come and go like rain in Texas, so you can be sure that I'll have a new "flavor of the week" from now until I die.

I feel my strongest skills as far as computer science goes are writing good, clean code, documenting it well, and debugging. I am pretty strong in C/C++ because that's basically all I have ever used for my entire academic career (is that a damning confession?), but I am open to learning any new languages, which I guess I would call a strength. When I'm wired in, I apply these rules in this order:

• I utilize the Allman indent style religiously, and you'll never convince me to do otherwise.
• I always lay out a skeleton of my code before filling pretty much anything in.
• If anything goes anywhere that I haven't put it yet, it's always //some stuff. Always.
• I always use /* C-style comments */ for non-end-of-line comments. Always.
• That being said, I know that end-of-line comments are generally bad form but I always find some way to justify them, and they're always //C++-style comments. Always.
• I only recently had cause to truly recognize the merits of version control, and I use SVN because that's what I know. Sue me.
• I usually work best late at night, because I'm a programmer, and that's just what we do.

If I had to pick a favorite class project, it would have to be my blog for my HCI class. It offers a fresh new perspective on information delivery and interaction with people across the web, and blogs are accessible to create and/or read for anybody. In addition, there is still some serious potential for application development and delivery across the web, and that's a plus for me. I am honestly disappointed that I hadn't put serious into a blog before now. My least favorite project was my marble jar project for my data structures and algorithms class. We basically had to implement several data structures by hand in the hopes that we would gain an intimate knowledge of their inner workings. Not so much Alright, I guess I learned a little. Great prof, and the project was simple - but that was just it. I could just as easily have learned how to utilize all of the data structures that I had to implement from scratch through another project that simply required their use. I felt at the time, and still feel, that the hands-on approach in that situation may have benefited some, but I was not among them.

Undoubtedly one of the greatest advances in technology of the past five years is the advent of the smartphone. Androids and iPhones and Blackberries, oh my! Come on: these things are like palm-top mini-computers, they're everywhere, and  they do everything  they do a bunch of things  "there's an app for that." These devices are revolutionizing the way that people interact with each other and with technology. This is the kind of stuff I love to see: I just know that there is a technology-based solution to any problem that you are having, and all I have to do is help you find it. Awe-inspiring, right?

So let me know when you're ready to help me change the world, and we'll win hearts and minds one day at a time.