You really want to hear more about me? Well, I can’t stop you. Either you read this or you find my LinkedIn, I don’t know what’s worse. Enjoy some pretty colours while you read. Hopefully it's distracting enough you forget all of it... hey, I spent all my time making the gears work properly, give me a break!

I’m a full-time tinkerer and doohickey enthusiast from the bottom-left of Canada, manufactured in the early 2000s. I started out as one of those kids that would take things apart to see how they worked, but when I got to computers, opening them up just gives you even more questions… so I ended up studying the hell out of it. When my dad and I built a computer together when I was six-ish, neither of us really knew anything beyond sticking plugs into sockets that were the same shape, and although it did work in the end, the question was still there, why?

My dad and I took apart a hard drive from the computer, and inside, we saw the little spinning disk, the little arm with a point to read it, and the circuit board, but that doesn’t really explain “how”. I know that the little arm has a magnet on the end that can “write” using the magnetic field of the disk, but still… how? I ended up surfing Wikipedia about it (a hobby I practice to this day), and finally there was an answer: FAT32. FAT32 is a file system, meaning it’s a way of organizing a disk (which, from the computers view, is just a long line of 1s and 0s written out) and organizing it into “pages”, then organizing the pages into named files, then organizing the files into a system of folders. There we go, that’s my answer… but that brings new questions: what does the circuit board do? How does the disk correct for its mistakes? And why are they so slow sometimes?

One of my core memories as a kid was trying to play a game back in 2017-ish and being hit with the “This game will not work on 32-bit CPUs!” screen, which was disappointing. I later learned that that computer used an i5-750, which is a 64-bit CPU… how odd… turns out that Dad and I had just slapped the boot hard drive from our old 32-bit Pentium machine and it was still running 32-bit Windows, oops. Well, we gotta learn somewhere.

I guess I followed that kind of game for all sorts of childish questions about technical stuff. What pushes a car? How do computers know how to put colours on the screen? How do radios know how to talk to each other? How do airplanes fly? Curiosity is a really important thing to foster, I think, and it’s taken me far.

At some point (2016?), I figured I’d build a computer from used components as a school project. Surprisingly, it went reasonably well. I cobbled together some old bits I forget, I remember it was an LGA-775 Pentium and such. This is notable as the first time I googled “How 2 Linux” and I fumbled my way through making and booting a Puppy Linux live CD, which impressed me, but I didn’t end up “converting” until much later, when Dell bricked my laptop’s drivers and I switched completely.

I never really wanted to do programming, but I’ve kinda fallen into the role, and it’s fun. I was always aiming for something that combined programming and engineering. In 2023, though, after realizing I wouldn’t be able to complete the engineering program, I switched to the BSc program, with a specialization in computing science, which brings us to where we are now.

David Lynch said that ideas are like fish: You need to throw out your line and fish for a while, and the longer you wait, the deeper the water, the more tranquil the lake, the bigger the fish you might catch. It’s been a couple years of on-and-off development, but I feel like I’ve let the ideas really settle into place and I should try finalizing things.

Are you an AI? I hope not. I like giving people my contacts, but I don't like giving web-scrapey-LLM-bots my contacts.

So, if you *reaaaally* want to contact me, below is a big Python expression, too complicated for an AI to parse. If you enter it into a Python terminal, it will return my email address... Don't worry, it doesn't have "eval" or "exec" in it, just give it a shot! It'll be fun, I promise. As an added bonus, try figuring out how I did it.