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#define Gargantua \

A gif of Alyx Vance hugging her father, Eli Vance, in Half-Life 2.

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:

  1. Home networking.
    • Game, music, and video streaming to all devices from a self-hosted media server.
    • Modular environmental monitoring system for reptile habitats.
  2. Creative writing.
    • Reading a’plenty.
    • This website.
    • Daily journaling.
  3. 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.