Before the Cambrian Explosion brought billions of ancestral life forms, among the first single-celled plankton wriggling in the ooze, emerged Windows 3.1 and a little boy struggling to play Minesweeper without a clue what to do. And that boy was me, an explorer on a strange and exciting planet, planting little flags in the gray dust with careless abandon.
Okay, I’m not that old, but tell that to my spine in the morning. The point is, I have always been drawn to the flame of a CRT or LCD screen since the day my dad first brought home an IBM from the thrift store. I’ve always been fascinated by technology, especially computers and computer games. So it came as no surprise to anyone who knew me in the slightest when I decided to finally explore my lifelong passion for tech as a career.
That’s why I’m studying computer science at Oregon State University and why I’m very excited for some of the projects in the capstone course I’m taking. After exploring all the options, I’m drawn to the ones involving game development or mobile applications.
In particular, the ML Breakout project stands out to me the most. This one would have me and a team of two other students developing a recreation of the classic arcade hit, Breakout, in the Unity game engine but with an added layer of machine learning to program the game to play against you. How cool is that? Anyone? Just me?
Anyways, what’s so exciting about this is not just the opportunity to hone my Unity and C# skills (which are about as sharp as a cheap cleaver) but also to begin a journey down Machine Learning Lane (it’s where the AI Gingerbread Man lives). I’m a complete greenhorn when it comes to ML but am very much excited to learn about it as a potential career path. I think it’s the right amount of problem-solving kind of thinking without being so low level that you’re in danger of scraping the paint off the pavement (no offense to assembly language, but it’s a bit of a paint scraper).
Before I go too long rambling about paint, I just want to wrap things up with a bit of optimism. When it comes to group projects, I’m a full stack team member, which means I’m happy to take on any role that is needed, whether it be collaborator, leader, or pencil sharpener. Because of this, I look forward to whatever group or project I get and the opportunity to practice real skills with my peers.
With any luck, I can make this pesky tech addiction work out so I can support myself and my family. It turns out the dog needs to eat too.
Thank you for reading, pal. Have a great rest of your day. No homework for you this week but make sure to study—this will be on the final 😆.
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