For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by both mechanical and electrical things and how things work. As a kid I would take my toys apart and see how they work and try to combine them with other toys to make something unique.
At around age ten I get my hands on my first computer and thats when everything picked up speed. I spent my time learning, tinkering and playing around with anything that interested me. I started with GameMaker, making pacman clones, and eventually moved on to 2D games in C++ with the help of libraries like SDL & Allegro.
Although at university I studied games programming, I quickly realized that my interests were far more broad and so these days I enjoy learning all kinds of technologies from backend server frameworks to deeply optimized graphics techniques.
In my spare time I have a few key interests that I always fall back to:
I am a big fan of customisation and configuring my tools to work exactly the way I want. Because of this, two of my main hobbies are customising and optimising my Linux and Vim workflows. I often find myself dumping hours into researching and tweaking my setups to best optimise it for my workflow.
As a programmer I really enjoy writing code. I get a great deal of satisfaction from completing a cool project or even just prototyping out a fun or interesting idea. Since I spend a bunch of my free time programming, I am always trying out new technologies and playing around with the latest and greatest. Recently I have been really enjoying learning Rust and I have also been honing my skills in UX/UI.
Not only do I enjoy learning new programming languages but I am also currently learning Mandarin Chinese 但我还有好多东西要学。
Despite much protest from my wallet, I am big on Home Automation. I have a home server running a completely local home automation service (Home Assistant) and have many smart lights and wireless sensors scattered around the house. When I open the front door, the hallway light turns on and sends a notification to my phone; when the bathroom gets too humid, the extractor fan turns on; when the sun sets, the kitchen, living room and office lights come on. You could argue the time I have spent setting it all up far outweighs the time I will ever save but I have enjoyed every second of setting it up.
