As a child, I was always fascinated with learning. Curiosity about the world drove my life. Now, not just any subject would peak my interest. Like any child, if you talked to three year old me about taxes and expenses, you would likely be met with tears or, more likely, a blank stare. What interested me was finding out how something worked. 

The day I went to my first concert is a core memory for me. There was a band coming to play at my parents' church, and they decided to bring me along. I must have been around four at the time. I remember very little from the actual concert. What I do remember is the breakdown of the stage. I was fascinated by the wires and speakers and lights that adorned the stage. It was strange, and I didn't understand how the pieces fit together, but I knew that I wanted to find out. That concert sparked an interest in technology in me that has been burning bright ever since.

Although I didn't know it at the time, my first interaction with programming was in 2012. This interaction came in the form of redstone in the new game, Minecraft. This "programming" was a very simple mechanism of inputs and outputs abstracted down to a form that a six year old playing a game with his older brother could understand.

Just a few years later, I managed to save up for an iPad mini. Naturally, the first application I installed was Minecraft. The liberty of having my own device and access to Minecraft's text input led me to discover the world of Minecraft commands. At first glance, Minecraft commands are nothing special. At a basic level, a user could use the text input system similarly to a command line interface (CLI) to give himself a bunch of items or cool effects. More interesting than that, I found that with these command line arguments, I could give myself a "command block", an item that could combine redstone with these newfound commands. In a way, this game introduced me to the world of scripting by using these elementary building blocks.

Throughout elementary school, I caught glimpses of "true" programming. In my computer class we would have Hour of Code sessions, in which we would use a very basic block-based programming system to make little figures move on screen. I enjoyed that class, but it left me wanting more. In fifth grade, I got some "more" of what I was looking for. 

My fifth grade teacher Mrs. Jenkins was a very influential teacher in my life. She introduced my class and I to Scratch. For those unfamiliar, Scratch is a block-based programming environment designed by MIT to teach young programmers the basics of programming in a fun and interactive manner. Mrs. Jenkins challenged my class with the task of creating a game or animation using Scratch. My first game was an incremental game inspired by two games that were popular at the time, Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist. After that, I made "Rainbow Ninja", a super simple 2D platformer.

In middle school my interest in programming broadened. My first day on campus was for the school's Open House. Right at the entrance to the campus, there was a highschooler displaying the remote control robot he built. As a nerd, I was in awe! I later found out that this student was part of the nearby high school's FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) program. While FTC is only reserved for highschoolers, my middle school had its own FIRST Lego League (FLL) program, which was the middle school equivalent. Needless to say, I was quick to join.

FLL was a fantastic experience. It taught me how to work together with other students to solve advanced problems in engineering and programming. Additionally, it was SUPER FUN! My best memories from middle school come from participating in FLL. Naturally, I participated in FLL all three of my middle school years. I participated in the Hydro Dynamics, Into Orbit, and City Shaper challenges. My role in Hydro Dynamics was rather small, as I was just getting my feet wet, but the following two years I was a key player in a team of around nine students. I loved making and programming the Lego Mindstorm robots. When I entered the zone, no one could tear me away.

My programming journey throughout high school was rather subpar. After middle school I moved to Florida and the high school I went to was trying out a new robotics curriculum. In that class I discovered microcontrollers, specifically Arduino Unos. I made a simple plant monitor and a remote control car. The following year I participated in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC). Being the first class to participate in FTC at this high school, our budget and resources were quite limited. I enjoyed the challenge of making a robot for FTC with the limited resources we had. Unfortunately, we did not place well in the competition we participated in. To satiate my desire to program, I looked to other sources, such as my TI-84 calculator. Whenever I finished my school work, I would work away at making a classic text-based adventure using the TI-84's rudimentary programming system. My time in high school was also rather short. My freshman year had been stolen by covid, and I ended up skipping my senior year.

College was when I started getting back into programming fully. I spent the Winter break of my first year learning programming skills from the CS50 course that Harvard offers through EdX. I spent my first year of college taking only GE courses with the intent to transfer elsewhere after my first year, but my second year I shifted goals to attain an associates in Computer Programming and Analysis. Since, I have taken Intro to Computer Programming, Computer Hardware, and Computer Software. I also took a capstone course and for my capstone project made a program that analyzes the semantic similarities between human and AI responses. I am still pursuing this Computer Programming and Analysis AS, and am set to graduate April, 2026. I have many more projects that I have been working on, and am still working on. Those can be found in the "projects" page.