Book Reading #2: Design of Future Things

Chapter 1


Reference Information

Title:
Author:
Editors:

Summary

Discussion

Book Reading #1: Extreme Programming Installed

Chapters 1 - 3

Reference Information

Title:

Author:

Editors:

Summary

Discussion

Introductory Entry

Hey, everyone, this is Brian Meyer, and most of you will at least recognize me as the bald guy haunting the halls of the Bright Building and other CS class rooms for the last few years. This is just a quick note to introduce myself to all of you.

I began studying Computer Science here at A&M to better help me support my wife and three kids. Once I am finished here acquiring my B.S., I intend to find employment at a company working on application level software as a developer. My longer term goal, however, is to gain employment in the game development industry either working for an established company or through my own start-up, Dark Sage Studios.

As such, my computing interests revolve around topics related to video game development, film making, and graphics. As a musician, I enjoy being able to transfer my musical thoughts into a digital environment, which includes writing music, development of audio drama podcasts, and recording and production of the podcast I do with my wife. In essence, if it is related to content creation for entertainment related reasons, it is something that interests me.

My strengths lie in digital content creation and production, as well as software design and development. My two strongest languages are C# and Java, though I can get around pretty handily in C++ and C. I have acquired countless hours of skill using my trusty debugger in Visual Studio and I feel that debugging seems to be a skill that is not fully appreciated in all settings. I am skilled at using video and audio editing software packages. I have used XNA for several projects and enjoy indulging in game development activities.

To date, the project that I liked the most was a little project I did for the Game Development class called Red Sector. It was a 2D space shooter game we did as the first of two projects for the class. I learned a lot doing that particular project. A close second would be our project, Sanctuary, that followed Red Sector in the Game Development class. I think I learned even more doing this 3D project, but still have a soft place in my heart for Red Sector.

http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/schaefer/teaching/489_Spring2010/initial_games/g1.html

There are several projects I have been required to complete that I have been less than fond of. I think everyone has them. However, of them all, I would have to say that the leading candidate for the assignment I am least fond of would actually be any involving Haskell. Take your pick. I'd rather take a punch in the face than deal with that language. Sorry, to anyone who enjoys it.

There have been a lot of developments that could be considered as the top tech development in the last 5 years. Of them all, I consider the proliferation of social media to be the strongest candidate. While it is not the most complex technically, it still has far reaching effects that cross international borders and cultures and is a major force in the world that is becoming responsible for many changing attitudes on a global scale.

I tend to favor plenty of white space in between blocks of code that symbolically form a paragraph. I really like when coders place plenty of relevant comments to explain their intentions and try to comment appropriately and adequately. Abstraction of code into helper functions and helper classes to increase code reusable and lower the need to rewrite the same thing several times is among my favorite design choices. I code best during the morning hours, but have had no problems when we had to have over nighters and marathon 30+ hour coding sessions when the deadlines were hitting. I love using C# when I can, because while there are a lot of critics of Microsoft, they have great tools and libraries.