Hi, my name is Jeremy Tsang and I am excited to be graduating this quarter! This course, CS 467, will be my final class and I hope I will be able to make something interesting. My background before OSU was in chemistry. In my first undergrad career I was mostly focused on computational/theoretical chemistry and afterwards attempted to pursue a graduate degree in it. To this day I think it is the subject I had the most fun studying, but unfortunately jobs in the field are far and few between. As a result I had to shift industries to something more practical and worked as a teacher and tutor for a little bit and then did some work in an agricultural chemistry lab. However, my time studying studying computational chemistry exposed me to programming. While working I always wondered if I would have more fun coding than doing routine lab work.
My suspicisions were confirmed when I began my coursework at OSU. I did enjoy most of the courses I have taken, especially the upper division ones like OS, parallel programming, and mobile development. In addition to the material being interesting, the instructors for those courses were great which added quite a bit to the learning experience. They were time consuming though and I did have to switch jobs once again as I found myself wasting a lot of time commuting at my previous job. However, some things in life happened and I had to take a break from school back in late 2022 while having to settle for work in retail temporarily. It is good to be back though!
With regards to favorite technologies, I would have to say the one I spend most of my free time on is GNU Emacs. I was introduced to it during my chemistry days and there is just something addicting about being able to configure it exactly to my liking as well as doing everything from a single program/context. Although my first experience with it was of course just a text editor, over the years configuring it has become more like a hobby. In addition to development I also use it for browsing the internet, reading PDFs, taking notes, scheduling tasks in my life with its agenda, and more. Due to its nature as a Lisp interpreter it ascends from being an editor to being platform for building text based apps. I am not the best when it comes to Emacs Lisp but I have gotten to the point where I can comfortably tinker with most things after reading the docs. Since nearly everything can be customized one way or another via Emacs Lisp this gives a large amount of control over packages (similar to VS Code extensions) that one uses. Any text related experience can be made to fit like a glove should I choose to invest the time to research it. Sometimes this can manifest as simple as rebinding a keyboard shortcut. Other times it can be more complex like writing a helper function to generate a LaTeX snippet for a polynomial of arbitrary degree. It does come at a cost however as it is easy to get carried away yak shaving.
Other than tinkering with Emacs, I like to spend time my free time weightlifting. I previously competed powerlifting but started weightlifting because I always thought snatching and clean and jerking looked challenging. Other hobbies I used to indulge in more frequently include playing/engraving piano music, playing old PC games (Dark Souls 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 are two favorites), and reading (mostly fantasy but sometimes non-fiction). Time always seems too short these days to get to everything though!