| Home |
About Me
Introduction
My name is Carter, I’m a Computer Engineer doing A/V Control Systems programming, FOSS programming, and DevOps engineering at American Sound.
Interests
I have a variety of interests, most of which lie in the domain of computing. I love to learn about and practice the C programming language, data science, systems programming, software engineering, and embedded systems. Outside of the computer science space, I also enjoy control systems, digital hardware engineering and reverse engineering, hobby-studying applied maths, self-hosting, building computers, and personal finance.
For the non-boring stuffs, I dabble in creative writing and journaling, reading, cooking, socializing with family and friends, watching American College Football, and the occassional video gaming. Yeah, I’m not that interesting. But my wife thinks I’m cool!
What am I Learning Right Now?
Having just obtained my B.S. in Computer Engineering from MTU, I now have much more time to tinker around. Currently, I fill my free time with research and practice in:
- Home networking.
- Game, music, and video streaming to all devices from a self-hosted media server.
- Modular environmental monitoring system for reptile habitats.
- Creative writing.
- Reading a’plenty.
- This website.
- Daily journaling.
- Systems programming.
- Writing a register-based virtual machine in C.
It’s a lot of projects for sure, but that’s the way I like to live. It keeps me happy :)
How Did I Get Here?
All the way back in the 6th grade (2013), a close childhood friend of mine walked up to me in the computer lab and whispered “Hey, Carter, watch this.” as he reached into his backpack. He pulled out a USB thumb drive and plugged it into my computer. He opened the Windows File Explorer to view the contents, and pulled a single .bat file from the drive onto the computer file system. He right clicked on it, and selected Run from the context menu. I watched in awe as the disk tray on every single computer in the computer lab began to open and close, over and over again.
That day, my friend was suspended from our school for “hacking the system”, as our computer lab instructor had put it. As for me, I spent the rest of the day Googling this .bat file extension, and saw what I recognized as computer code. I had heard of it and seen programmers and hackers portrayed in movies and video games, but I knew nothing past that. Knowing my mother did work with computers, I asked her about it when I went home after school. Having majored in Computer Science herself during the 90s, she was excstatic to hear that I was interested in programming, and set up her laptop to allow me to play around with batch scripting.
And just like that, I was hooked.
Favorites
| Thing | Favorite | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Book | Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire | A bit pretentious at times but as an aspiring educator I took a lot of ideas from it that made me very successful in mentoring. The central theme is removal of power imbalance between teachers and students. |
| Video Game | Half-Life 2 | It’s a great game, yeah, but also very nostalgic for me. I inherited my older brothers’ games when he moved out and I got a laptop with a disk drive, and this was my favorite as a kid. |
| Movie | No Country for Old Men | I have watched this movie over a dozen of times just for the characters. Llewelyn Moss is so intelligent and calculated, and Anton Chigurh is hauntingly sociopathic and destructive. |
| Album | Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers | Nothing will ever re-create the cultural phenemonen that was the Wu-Tang clan, and their charisma and talent makes this album the best hip-hop album in history. 36 Chambers is an acquired taste, but nobody is immune to warming up to and eventually falling in love with such a fantastic piece of rap history. |
| Song | Tumble in the Wind (Version 2) by Jackson C. Frank | If you like folk music, you have to check out Jackson C. Frank. His story is one of the saddest you’ll have ever heard, which is saying something if you know of other folk artists. This song was recorded in a cheap apartment in NYC with a crappy hand recorder during his final illness-plagued years. His heavy breathing and broken voice paint the picture of a tired man, which he very much was. |
| Programming Language | C | Fun language. Flawed language. I love it and I hate it. When working on personal projects, it is my language of choice because I love its design and history, and the writing code for metal. |
| Food | Indian Butter Chicken | I just love it okay |
Specs
Laptop (Daily Driver) Software
| Type | Software |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Debian 12 Bookworm |
| Desktop Environment | KDE Plasma |
| Window Manager | Heavily riced KWin |
| Shell | Fish |
| Terminal Emulator | tmux |
| Font | Wumpus Mono Pro |
Laptop (Daily Driver) Hardware
| Type | Hardware |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-8350U 8 core @ 3.60 GHz |
| GPU | Intel Integrated UHD Graphics 620 @ 1.10 GHz |
| RAM | 32GB of PC4 (DDR4) |
| Storage | 2TB Samsung SATA SSD |
Programming Environment
| Type | Software |
|---|---|
| Text editor (lightweight tasks) | Sublime Text or VSCode for Markdown |
| IDE | CLion for personal projects, Visual Studio for work |
| C Compiler and Standard | GCC with C17. Clang if absolutely necessary. |
| Git Hosting Service | GitHub for personal projects and work, Azure DevOps for work. |