about me

(Note, this website is still a work in progress.)

Hi! I'm Eric. I'm an avid film lover and moviegoer, a lifelong follower of technology and software, and an ever-attempting-to-improve home chef. I'm always excited to learn something new—whether that be how to perfect my chicken stock, what exactly happened between Carl Dreyer and Falconetti on the set of The Passion of Joan of Arc, or how to actually conceptualize what a monad is (still trying).

I suppose the natural next-step to the 'about me' is my personal history of where I'm from and how I've come to be—but this isn't necessarily a straightforward response following my 22-or-so years on Earth. I never have a definitive answer of where exactly I'm from, but the basic gist goes as follows:

After so many moves and enough cardboard boxes to take down about three acres of timberland, I tend to opt for a mental focus on living in the present; not necessarily rejecting future or past, but in remembrance of life's incessant ability to mix things up; so I may as well enjoy today. So, as such, I think that gives me some level of authority over the 'now is now' notion I have sitting atop this website, a reminder to myself to savor every moment, and a reminder to any reader of this bio to watch Perfect Days if they have not already done so.

why software?

It's interesting to think about what I've decided to do with my life so far, the choices that led up to it, and what I plan to do hereafter. Of course, having recently (at the time of writing this) received my university diploma in the mail certifying me as a holder of a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, a major aspect of my life—for at least the past forty-eight months, the present, and the foreseeable future—is making computers do interesting things, and understanding how to make them be even more interesting. So, why decide to devote myself, my sleep, my money, and a significant amount of cognitive effort to make computers do interesting things? Like many of my generational peers, I have fond memories in my childhood related to computers. Taking off the side of beefy Windows XP-enabled workstation and blowing dust out of the heatsinks. Infecting my ill-fortuned mother's laptop with trojan horses whilst attempting to download modifications for my Minecraft world at the age of ten. At eleven, competent enough to be unzipping .jar files and dragging the contents into the installation file. Debugging my first technological mishap after I realized I failed to install the proper dependencies for the aforementioned modification. I grew up comfortable with computers, so computers never really left my mind.

The first time I encountered programming was in the fifth grade. I distinctly remember a long sequence of evenings where a KhanAcademy JavaScript course was all I wanted to do for the rest of the night, and it was all I could think about at school the following day. Something about learning this new way to draw shapes and colors with words in a text box drew me in, posed as a sort of puzzle—I knew what I wanted to draw, so how do I make it appear? Throughout most of high school, I was interested in medicine. Anatomy, Chemistry, Biology—this is what I liked, it's what I was going to focus on, devote my time and energy to. And yet, the pull of my childhood desire to be immersed in the quasi-supernatural nature of technology still lingered. I signed up for an AP Computer Science course in my senior year of high school, and I loved it. I loved the challenges the course ideas posed, and I loved the thrill of solving of them. I was hooked.

today's interests

My personal journey in technology has brought me from one thing to another while I explore more and more, but recently I have found myself most interested in the technical intersection of form and usability. While my fingers are most comfortable typing out functions and debugging errors, my mind has become increasingly fascinated with how users will experience the technology I create. This curiosity was first sparked when I transformed a command line application I'd built at work into a full-stack website. What began as a straightforward engineering task evolved into something more profound: How do users actually interact with what I build? How does the presentation of technology influence its effectiveness? Though I lack formal design education, I've found myself drawn deeper into researching UX principles and UI engineering, exploring the balance between technological function and aesthetic form. I'm still very much a programmer first, but I'm learning to see each project through the dual lenses of functionality and user experience.