guest@BipbopPC:~$ cat about.txt

I'm a Computer Science graduate out of CSU Chico, and most of what I enjoy sits close to the hardware: firmware on microcontrollers, C and C++ that has to be fast, sockets, parallel code, and the parts of computer architecture that explain why a program is slow. I like problems where the constraint is real and there's no arguing with it. An Arduino driving a 10x10 LED matrix gives you 2 KB of SRAM, and either the whole game fits in that or it doesn't run.

A lot of my projects started as coursework and kept going after the grade was in. The A* visualizer worked fine as a single-threaded program, but making it run a thousand solvers at once meant pulling the open set, closed set, and target pointers out of shared state and into a self-contained AStarSolver struct, since parallelizing it as it was would have made the whole thing one giant race condition. After that, a single OpenMP directive was all the parallelism the problem needed... it was almost too easy, until the speedup flattened out at 3 threads and I had to figure out why.

Outside of school I pick up languages and toolchains on my own time, and I like the physical side of computing too. Soldering, etching my own PCBs with ferric chloride, CNC routing, and a Technician Class HAM license. In my last year of high school, and during several breaks I took over the years through college, I worked in various departments of my family's business, Gemperle Family Farms. For two weeks of that I was pulling and terminating CAT cable through packing plants and egg ranches for the network engineers, and I learned pretty quickly that the network on the diagram doesn't have much to do with the network up in the rafters. The rest of the time I was running the register at the company store or helping the CFO keep the office in order, which at one point meant refiling and digitizing twelve years of financial records ahead of an audit. That one took a while.