I am a student, currently between degrees, most recently studying for Honours in Computer Science at The University of Tasmania.
Academia etc
Schooling
I spent the entirety of my schooling at The Hutchins School in Hobart, from 1992-2006.
University
I started studying at UTAS in 2006 via their Advanced Placement Programme, the High Achiever Program, in which I studied first-year Computer Science. In August 2009 I graduated as a Bachelor of Science in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, and recently completed an Honours Component in Computer Science (researching Computer Vision), for which I was awarded First Class Honours.
Outside of studying, I am the President of TUCS, The UTAS Computing Society for 2008-2009, after being 3rd-year Rep during 2008, I started the society’s successful series of Tech Talks, amongst other things.
Programming
I’ve been programming since I was 11 (in some form or another), my first language was Microsoft QBasic (I’m not ashamed of this at all). Since then, I’ve learned C, C++, PHP and Java (amongst others). My favourite language at the moment is Python, and this is unlikely to change for quite some time.
I enjoy Programming Competitions. At a school level, alongside my teammate Jet Holloway, did well in teams competitions, including twice reaching the finals of UNSW ProgComp, and twice winning our respective divisions in the Australian Computer Programming Competition, which led us to represent Australia in the SEARCC International Schools’ Software Competition in both 2004 (in Chennai, India) and 2005 (in Sydney, Australia).
At university level, I have competed in the ACM South Pacific Programming Contest, achieving equal 11th place with my team in 2007, and third place in 2008 and 2009. Success in the 2008 competition led us to receiving a Wild Card entry to the 2009 ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition Finals, held in Stockholm, Sweden in April 2009, where we achieved equal 49th place, of 100 teams present.
Community
In 2006 and 2007, I voluntarily taught introductory programming and computer science at Hutchins, with a particular emphasis on traning teams for programming competitions, in particular, using Python. In 2008, I tutored at The University of Sydney‘s National Computer Science School, a week-long summer school for high school students, that I attended in 2006.
I attend Free and Open Source Software conferences. I’ve been a serial attendee at linux.conf.au since the 2008 conference at the University of Melbourne. At LCA2010 in Wellington, New Zealand, I ran the Open Programming Languages Miniconf.
Interests
I believe in Free Software, thus I run Debian GNU/Linux on my computers, and license my personal projects under the GNU General Public License, or similar licenses.
I also contribute to Wikipedia and Wikibooks on a regular basis. A Wikibooks project that I adopted, and led, How To Build A Computer, has achieved Book of the Month and Collaboration of the Month status.
I have made the Slashdot Front Page, on September 8, 2005.
