About Me

For the most part not too many of you know much if anything about me, so I figured I would tell.

A little history:

I'm a recent college grad (May 2002) with my BS in Computer Science and Mathematics. When I started out in college I was going for my BS in Mathematics and I decided to take Computer Science on the side.  Then I fell in love with computers.  I didn't even own a computer until 1999, heck I hadn't even been on the internet until 1998 when I started working in my school's computer lab as an assistant.  I continued to work in the computer lab, eventually (after about 2yrs) becoming a full time employee for the university in charge of most of the computer labs on our campus.  I worked for the university until my last semester at which point I wanted a developer job.  So I began working as a software developer for a small (two developer) software company in Feb 2002, which is when I started programming in, my now favorite programming language, C#.

I don't consider myself to be an expert in anything (related to programming).  I do consider myself to be an excellent problem-solver; I think this is from my math background.  I have learned a ton this last year about .Net, XML, SQL Server, and programming in general.  I learned most of it from the DevelopMentor and the Win_tech_off_topic lists.

Current News:

            I have decided to go to Grad School for Computer Science.  I have applied to University of Virginia, Virginia Tech (this is where my girl friend is doing her masters), and University of Tennessee.  So far I have only heard from UT, they have offered me a Teaching Assistantship, I will keep you updated on my blog.  So why did I decide to go?  I figured if I want to go I should go now and not wait because it will be much harder to do later in life because of my career and family.  I also want to kind of work for a larger company, to where I don’t have work directly for the owner, especially since we have different views.  With the economy the way it is it will be hard to find a position so I figure I can get a Teaching or Research Assistantship while I’m in grad school and spend the 2 yrs trying to find a job.  Another factor is Ramola’s (my girl friend) parents; they would prefer that I pursue my Masters.  So all total I was able to convince myself that now is the right time to go. 

In grad school I hope to be able to explore some of my interests in programming, which are programming languages (ie, compilers, parsers, lexers, etc). I don’t know why but I seem to have a fascination with understanding a language or specification for any document and then being able to parse it into logical pieces so that can be used by/for other things.  I’m particularly interested in developing some kind of parser, to parse code into some structure to where coding rules and standards can be applied and the code be rewritten to file (code beautifier).  I constantly hear horror stories about maintaining code and the readability of other people’s code.  There are products on the market that claim to do some of this code clean up but not that work in general.  I would like to come up with some structure of describing a language in such a way that the structure can be used by any language.

What do I do in my spare time?

            I work on miscellaneous small .Net projects maybe I will polish some up and post them.  I compete in TopCoder programming competitions.  I play WarCraft III. I do everything computer related except talk to my girl friend Ramola. 

Well that is enough rambling.  I usually don’t have a lot to say so I’m wondering how this blogging thing is going to work out for me.

Wes