Coding Soup for the Soul

As I am writing this post, my team is working on the final assignment for our capstone project this quarter. I’m happy to be finishing with my Fall course load, and almost more excited to start again in the Winter. Alongside the capstone, I’ll be working on a personal project under CS 406, which will allow me a lot of freedom (but also responsibility!) to work on something I’m interested in. Most importantly, I’ll get the chance to complete a full program from start to finish entirely by myself; the excitement is certainly at least half nerves (but isn’t that the point, sometimes?).

Winter also brings competition season, making it my peak busy season. Equipment moves, fundraising, out of state meets, and my regular job take up the vast majority of my time outside of school. There’s an old proverb (popularized by The Shining) stating that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. My coach has a motto that is far more befitting of the collegiate athlete: “Play hard, work harder”. While these have similar messages, I believe the latter properly highlights the importance of both practices, equally. The privilege and thrill of competition is enough to make the rest worth it, but I’ve learned to find the fun in things whenever I get the chance.

In the time since my last post, I have been placed into a project group, and we have gone through several phases of design. Our assignment is to create an emulator for the NES. I believe this was my second choice when I filled out the survey, so I’m pretty excited for the development phase next quarter!

For now, we are tasked with focusing on design, so there hasn’t been any actual programming yet. I expected all of this planning to feel tedious, but it’s honestly been very helpful for my understanding of the project and its requirements. This design phase is forming a strong foundation that my team can build our project upon, and I think I’ll be very grateful for it come Winter quarter.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on finalizing a schedule for the rest of my senior year. I recently switched my major focus from the cybersecurity track to a custom option, which has certainly been a transition. I’m happy to say that I now have a pretty solid plan, which I think is preferable to the path I was on previously.

Regardless of the specific courses I end up taking, I am in a constant state of amazement from the fact that I only have two quarters left of school (after the current one ends, of course). This is the culmination of almost seventeen years of education, or about eighty percent of my lifetime so far. To say I’m excited is an understatement, but it’s bittersweet in many ways. For the first time ever, I won’t be guided by the structure of academia– I’ll have to figure out a career and life for myself.

As is the case for most major life changes, my situation is just as full of hope as it is of uneasiness. A lack of structure also means a world of possibilities; old eras ending lead to new beginnings. I often think about the concept of “senioritis”, the lack of motivation and desire to simply be done with things that can come at the end of the long journey of higher education. While it is tempting to let the waves of time wash over me, I remind myself that I didn’t come this far, to only come this far.

A blog is only as interesting as its author, so I think it’s important that you, whatever audience may be reading this, have some information about the guy on the soapbox. I’ll try and keep things short– consider this a quick greeting, a traditional “hello, world!” from me to you.

My name is Carter, and I currently live in Seattle, Washington. I didn’t get started with programming until high school, where I took some classes and found I really enjoyed the type of problem solving it required. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as figuring out a logical flow or squashing a particularly resilient bug, then watching the code finally run as intended.

My favorite technology by far is anything involving embedded systems. It’s absolutely fascinating how software can be used to make machines do things, using digital instructions to create physical output. I still have a lot to learn (incidentally, my lowest grade so far has been in Computer Architecture and Assembly Language), but I hope to one day work in the robotics industry.

Lastly, I am a competitive gymnast for the Washington Men’s Gymnastics Team. I spend much of my time at practice or volunteering, as we are an entirely self-funded program. Academically, I’m a Beaver, but I will bleed purple until the day I die: