A Long Time Ago in a High School Far, Far Away...
The day feels like it belongs to a different life. A friend walked up to me with their TI-83+ and uttered the phrase that would both ignite my passion and become the bane of my existence — "check out this cool thing I made!". It was a program that performed an incredibly "complex" task — drawing a line across the screen. Until that moment, I thought calculators were just for math. Naturally, I was intriqued.
It wasn’t long before I dove headfirst into the rabbit hole that continues to plague my existence. First I downloaded a Snake game for the calculator. Shortly thereafter I made my own. Then came Chess (which mostly worked), followed by all sorts of utilities—quadratic solvers, molar mass calculators, synthetic division helpers, and even a Pokémon battle simulator. High school me was unstoppable if not mildly sleep-deprived.
Fast-forward to today and the agony has greatly worsened. I've added way too many programming languages to a list that, ironically, started at 0. My graphing calculator collection has expanded far beyond the capabilities of my wallet. Along the way, I've leveled up with skills far cooler and more practical —server administration, web development, cybersecurity, cryptography, and a knack for tinkering that has me breaking and then managing to fix just about anything.
