My history with computers stretches as far back as I can remember. Long before the Internet really even took off. Back with our extremely slow Packard Bell (no HP, yet) desktop, I used to play SkiFree and write stories with Notepad. Then we used CompuServe ISP to download games and begin surfing the web.

In middle school I used computers in my father's office to learn how to edit HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. to create websites for my father's business as well as for those of friends and family. This evolved into a more solid business in high school that helped me earn a decent amount of money. In high school, I also began programming with Visual Basic and in calculator languages to make simple games including an old RPG game.

I started CPS at Duke in my first semester by taking CPS06. Unfortunately for me in this course, I am a member of the final class to learn exclusively C++ instead of Java during these courses. In fact, after taking a year off of CS last year to finish my ECE degree, I never had a chance to really learn Java. So, this course should be a significant challenge while I attempt to come up to speed with the rest of the class.

Last Summer I decided to adopt a CS major as a dual major for my ECE degree. That's why I'm taking what many consider to be the hardest course of the CS sequence so late. I love programming, I love debugging, and I love running what I've made. Huffman was the proudest moment of my Duke CS career and I hope to have similar projects to be proud of in this class as well.

My worst programming experience has to be my debugging experiences in my Embedded Systems course. In that course we were programming a communication system between two microprocessors using assembly language. Rigging the communication system between the two boards using nothing but the hardware reference manual and a port that wasn't intended for this communication, we spent 6 hours debugging 6 lines of code. Worst of all, we can't fully account for what fixed it. You can't just add COUT statements (or System.out statements, however java works) to debug these programs. It's incredibly hard to test threaded programs in an assembly program. Bleh.

In the future, I don't know what I'll be doing with CS, but I hope it's involved somehow. I love CS, and I think in hindsight I would've been a CS major if I had it all to do over again.