Hello world!
14 Jul 2014I’m Kevin, a rising sophomore Computer Science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I figured I’d start a blog. Here goes nothing.
Moderately interesting bio
I’ve been fascinated by computers for as long as I can remember. I built my first computer in 2006, at age 11. That baby had a dual-core AMD Athlon processor, 1 GB of memory, 80 GB of storage, and ran Windows XP. Around the same time, I discovered HTML, and I made a state-of-the-art website with tables, “Under Construction” gifs, and probably a <marquee> element or two. If I recall correctly, it was modestly titled, “Kevin’s Awesome Website.”
My first real exposure to programming was at an iD Tech Camp at Fordham University in 2009, the summer before my freshman year of high school. There I took a one-week “Programming in C++” course. I came out of the course with my own text adventure called Game, in which you play as a secret agent tasked with stealing KFC’s secret recipe. More importantly, however, I came out of the course with a newfound passion for programming.
Shortly afterward, I entered Stuyvesant High School, which was to be the most stressful yet rewarding four years of my life thus far, and a topic about which I will most certainly write more in the future. There, I joined the school’s FIRST Robotics team as a freshman—specifically, its programming division, where I learned how to work with, and later coordinate, a team of software engineers to write robot code in Java. From sophomore year onwards, I took every CS course offered by Stuy, and graduated with highest honors in Computer Science.
I graduated from Stuy in 2013, and have just finished my freshman year at UIUC, where I am a member of ACM@UIUC, the UIUC student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. I am spending this summer as an software engineer intern at Khan Academy, an experience about which I will go into more detail in a future post.
Finally: Why did I choose to start a blog?
I’ve been meaning to start a blog in order to share my experiences as a developer and as a human being. As it turns out, one of the three pillars of development at KA is to “Be open. Share your work.”
Focus on sharing our work both internally and externally with the entire community. Blog about your work. Tell the whole team when you deploy something new. Open source any useful frameworks. Walk down the street and yell to a stranger whenever you ship. Be open, we work on cool stuff.
To which I say: What better time to start than now? Blog I will! I look forward to seeing where this will go.