Nanogoogle - Team FileFind
Flocks and Springs - Company Name
VOOGA - No Name
I'm a senior from Chapel Hill. I started using computers in elementary school, so it's hard to remember whether my first experience was with the Apple IIs they had there or the one time my father brought home an early Macintosh from work. I've used Macs at home ever since, though I've been exposed to Windows and Unix/Linux at school and work. Right now, I'm stuck with a pre-Intel Mac laptop which I use for most of my classwork and whatever silly Flash games I can find on the Internet.
I always thought the idea of making a computer do whatever you wanted it to was cool, and saw the creative potential of programming pretty early on. A couple of us in my fourth-grade academically gifted class made a very random choose-your-own-adventure game in HyperStudio that I still remember pieces of. I never wound up studying computer science specifically until I got to Duke, but I decided to go into it (As well as ECE) because I was always a math/science person but straight math didn't have as many interesting applications. Computer science let me apply something I was good at academically to something I liked personally, and have some good job opportunities, too.
The computer scientists I've spent the most time around have been developers at the tech companies I've worked at, and they spend their time coding, designing, and implementing. I must admit that I sometimes miss where any of the skills we learn in a computer science program come in to most of it other than writing code.
My favorite programming experience was so because it tied into another of my random interests, competitive puzzle-solving. The MIT has a giant, weekend-long event every January with upwards of 50 nasty puzzles that each take multiple man-hours to solve. Blather is one I handled myself, with the help of a few utility programs- I won't spoil it, though. My favorite more serious project was the Compsci 110 project series, because it got us using more low-level stuff and making an interesting system.
In the future, I'll be working in the industry as a developer, so I'll be working with computers in that sense on a daily basis. Outside of work, I'll probably be doing more of the same, probably getting more into interesting side programming projects and gaming as time and technology allow.