User:Slawmaster

Bio

I am a third year Computer Engineering student at RIT. User:Mwn3d introduced me to this site in the fall of 2007 and I've been adding little bits from time to time since then. I'm currently on a 6-month co-op at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA, where I'm doing O.S. work on supercomputers; most of what I've been doing is Plan 9 related, which is something I'm very interested in (see below).

Yes, I ripped off this user page design from mwn3d. I'm pretty sure he doesn't mind.

Languages

Although I poked around in Perl and BASIC before starting college, I didn't really do any programming until I took Java in Comp Sci 1 through 3. I really don't care for Java much, so I was a lot happier when we started C++ in Comp Sci 4. However, I'm a low-level kind of guy; object-oriented programming doesn't do much for me. Assembly class, where we learned assembly on the Motorola 68000, was pretty cool, and doing C in my Operating Systems 1 and Applied Programming courses was even better. I also learned C# for a summer job with Velocitek, LLC and regard it as a slightly better version of Java. I have also been dabbling in Common Lisp for a while; to help myself learn it, I've been trying to add Lisp code to this site whenever possible.

At my current job, I'm doing mostly systems-level C programming with a bit of x86/AMD64/PPC assembly on the side. I've also been using AWK, sed, and rc to do some scripting and data manipulation.

Operating Systems

My first OS was either DOS/Windows 3.11 or an early MacOS. I didn't really care about computers for much besides games (Commander Keen and MS Flight Sim) until I hit about 8th grade. Then, I heard about Linux, bought a 486, and started experimenting. I've used Linux as my desktop OS since then. In the last 3 years or so, I've become interested in the Plan 9 operating system. My current job involves mainly porting Plan 9 and associated software to different hardware, like the AMD 64 processor and the Cray XT-4 supercomputer.