Who is Chris?

Yo world.

My name is Chris and I’m an imposter. I’m currently a third-year student at Seneca College taking Computer Programming and Analysis, and this is my blog for Fall 2020’s OSD600-NSA. I currently reside on the third planet, but more specifically in Toronto, Canada.

Welcome.

I began dabbling with computer for longer than I’ve been alive now (which I will refrain from specifying at this time.) Anything digital has always attracted me, and thus I soon became the token “tech guy” of my family and friends. The natural step in this direction was either systems management (which I suppose is DevOps now), network administration, IT (shudder), or Software Development. It wasn’t until about 1-3 years ago that I started to seriously move past reading about development and technology to actively programming. Linux, modding, and game server administration were pillars of my technical youth so naturally, the next step in this direction was Open Source.

Most people want to feel as though they belong to something, and I think being an active contributor is the most time efficient way to provision this (or enlist.) Programming is my craft and I believe if you want to get better you should always strive to be the dumbest person in the room, and when you’re on the internet everyone is the dumbest person in the room (well, except for Linus Torvalds.)

That being said, I’m not sure what I’d like to work on over these next four months. I’ve been a World of Warcraft “player” since it came out, and a new major expansion pack is right around the corner. I’m sure there’ll plenty of opportunity to update the soon-to-be-broken User Interface addons (they break every expansion as Blizzard updates the UI API.)

I also have some experience in ML so playing around with visualization/analysis/ml libraries would be neat but I’m sure that’s way above my paygrade.

There’s also a workspace application that manages applications that would be fun to contribute to Rambox.

Finally, I’d like to actually migrate some of these posts to an actual blog when I get around to designing one for the purpose of boosting my employability communication.

An interesting trending repo is that of The Fastai Book. It’s an open source notebook that covers an introduction to deep learning, fastai, and PyTorch. The notebook is actually used in conjunction with an online course to learn the above topics! It contains code examples written in Python (which is quickly become the defacto ML language.) The notebook is separated into Jupyter Notebook files for corresponding chapters.

I chose this repo because I have passing interests and experience in ML, as I actually was involved in designing an Unsupervised Machine Learning model for the Ministry of Transportation as part of my 4 month co-op from May to August of this year. It’s something I’ve starred and bookmarked and will definitely be taking a look at. Although if there’s one thing I learned from my co-op, it’s that ML may not be the topic for me.

Anyway, that’s enough about me. I’m friendly most of the time so if any readers would ever like to chat about anything, I’m available.

Take care, be safe, and thanks for all the fish,

C