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 doing the summer quarter at RIT. I just finished a 6-month co-op at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA, where I did O.S. work on supercomputers; most of it was Plan 9 related, which is something I'm very interested in (see below). I'm still working for them, just part-time and telecommuting.

I live in what I call the Rosetta Code Power Apartment; all three of us (User:Qrush, User:Mwn3d, and me) are involved more or less in RC (more for mwn3d and qrush, less for me).

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.