Computer Science 108 - Spring 2009

Haoyu Chen

Projects

Compsci and ECE projects I've worked on:

CompSci 108


About Me

Name: Haoyu Chen
From: Cary, North Carolina
Year: Sophomore
Hobbies:
        I play tennis and ping pong and love to run. Additionally, I like messing around with electronics and playing video games.


Computer Science Bio

I first started using a computer probably around the end of elementary school. At first it was just for fun and games, and now I use it for everything from movies to math to chatting. Because of the seemingly limitless possibility of things one can do on the computer, I've always been interested in how programmers have made all of this possible. I think what really got me into computer science was the creation of the gameboy emulator. What was then a hundred dollar toy was so easily recreated using software alone. I still don't know just how they did that. Additionally, I just really enjoy challenges and solving problems, which is why I'm taking computer science, and also what I think computer scientists do on a daily basis.

Because I've always been into the latest technology and want to try out everything,  I've had experience dealing with many kinds of computers.
    - My desktop is dual-booting Windows XP Pro and the newly released Windows 7 Beta
    - My laptop is dual-booting Windows 7 Beta and Ubuntu 8.10
    - I've also had dealings with other linux distributions, windows Vista, and to a smaller extent OSX.

My best programming experience was when I tried to create a 2D side-scrolling game in Cpp over summer. At the time I knew very little of Cpp and absolutely nothing about DirectX or Windows programming, and so it was a lot of fun/fustration trying to figure out how to make a game from scratch. I had to figure out how to communicate with my graphics card through DirectX and also how to communicate with windows. I even got to do a bit of TCP and UDP coding which was very interesting. Though I never finished, it was a great experience, and I plan to complete the game next summer. My favorite programming project was "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon". It was definately one of the coolest and most complete projects we got to do in CPS100E. I liked it because we pretty much wrote the entire thing ourselves (I even did the GUI) unlike previous projects where we just filled in the blanks.

Computers will be a huge part of our lives in the future. I see myself as either an Engineer or a CS programmer in the future and will be using the computer for many purposes.