About Me
I’m Ash, a senior CS major who’s been attending OSU since late 2021. I live in the state of Georgia just outside of Atlanta, and was born and raised here! While I haven’t traveled outside of the U.S. yet, I have been across the continental U.S. multiple times. I have family located in many different states, so I’ve had frequent opportunities to go on roadtrips.
Although I originally transferred to OSU via Ecampus due to the ongoing pandemic, I’ve come to immensely appreciate education in an online format. Prior to being a part of the CS program, my programming knowledge was entirely self-taught through any online tutorials I could find to help me achieve my goals.
While I didn’t start my programming journey at a young age like many others I’ve known, I have been obsessed with technology for essentially my entire life. It was only when I was older did I realize the amount of control I could gain by learning to use the languages that powered my favorite things.
At the age of 13, I opened a Minecraft server that was originally for a few friends I had. I chose to make it public only a few days after as I thought it would be nice to have a place for anyone to join that shared similar interests. To my surprise, that server would turn into a thriving community of thousands of unique players. Although I decided to close the server in 2023 after 9 years of uptime, it is what ultimately drove me into the career path of a programmer.
A few years after the server was opened, I recalled my prior experience making mods for Minecraft. However, I realized that I was going to have to learn a LOT more to be able to make what I wanted to for a public server with so many people. At 16 years old, I started learning all of the Java I could alongside the APIs used for modifying Minecraft servers.
Since my programming journey started 7 years ago, I have learned more than I ever could’ve imagined. Beginning with a self-taught approach to Java proved to be one of my best decisions as I quickly found the strong passion I had for programming. From there, I focused on improving my Java knowledge as much as possible. I eventually would find myself pursuing a CS degree and branching out into more languages and technologies than I knew existed!
The Capstone
Here I am at the last year of my degree. It’s amazing how fast time has gone by, and I would love to say these last 3 terms aren’t going to pass me by too. Since my first term at OSU, I’ve known there would one big project to mark the end of my CS degree. Little did I know that I would already be here looking through all of the projects to find one that resonates strongly enough with me to commit 9 months to it.
I’m excited to get started, but at the same time there is definitely a sense of nervous anticipation finding out what project and team I’m going to be a part of. Working as a team for nearly a year compared to the single-term team projects I’ve had in the past is quite a leap.
That’s not to say I don’t feel ready for it. I’m very confident that I’ll be able to adapt to whatever is needed and hopefully make some great connections! Having no professional experience in the software industry, I see this as my first taste of what it would be like to be in that world.
My Project Picks
While there is still time to change my mind on my project picks (as of writing this post), I’ve been eyeing a few projects since before the term started.
My top 5 projects in order of least desired to most desired:
5. Create and Play Board Games
Although this is at the bottom of my top 5, it’s important to remember that these projects were chosen out of dozens of options. What stood out to me with this project is that I love the creativity behind creating a board game creator. Rather than just making a game that players must abide by the rules of, this allows for anyone to come up with their own rules and share a game with others. I grew up with board games as a major part of how I spent my time with my family. I can see the potential for a custom board game tool giving people a nice way to connect during times of boredom!
4. Malware Analysis
Due to my major focus being in Cybersecurity, I know there is immense value in a project dedicated to understanding malware. While I love the idea of growing my skillset as a security engineer, I find that my motivation lies more within programming and the process of creation as opposed to pure research. I wouldn’t be unhappy being a part of this project, but I have my hopes set on other things.
3. Website Security Research Project
Unlike the Malware Analysis, this project allows for programming to come into play in order to make a purposefully vulnerable web app! Having already played around with the Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA), I’m already excited at the prospect of getting to be on the side that creates the problems for others to exploit. Although Cybersecurity is my focus, there were a few projects that stood out to me as more interesting still.
2. A-Life Challenge
This was nearly my top choice due to the concept of working on my very own simulator for something as complex as life itself. The multitude of possibilities that a life simulator would allow for is such a fascinating prospect for me. I could easily see myself become captivated by watching the program run, and thinking about what other unique traits could be thrown into the gene pool. It’s no coincidence that this project resonated so strongly with me due to Spore being one of my favorite games from my childhood!
1. Escape Room Challenge
Despite my immense interest in the A-Life Challenge, I felt that the Escape Room Challenge would be the project best suited for me. The Portal franchise is likely my all-time favorite video game franchise. That naturally comes with me having a deep love for puzzle games, especially ones that are able to make the player feel genuinely rewarded for solving said puzzles.
It’s an extremely delicate balance to create puzzles that feel hard enough to where the player can’t randomly stumble into the solution, yet easy enough to where the player isn’t sitting there wondering whether the game was even playtested. I believe participating in this project would give me the best opportunity to not only hone in on skills associated with making 3D games, but also allow me to contribute my creativity to the genre of puzzle games.
There is immense potential in creating a game that relies on the player’s reasoning skills rather than their mechanical skills.
Conclusion
I thank you for reading this post (or even skimming it) as blogging is something I never thought I’d be doing! Alongside whatever project I’m a part of, I hope that this blog is able to serve as a reminder of how far I’ve come and as a way for others to glimpse into the last bit of my long college journey.
