About
Dean Pearce
Hello I’m Dean Pearce, a 19 year old Computer Science student at Carleton University. I’m passionate about software development, and believe that the best ideas can come from the most unobvious places. I got into programming at around the age of 9, about a year after our household got its first computer. I knew I was in over my head, but I pushed on with the belief that I would at some point finally make a breakthrough. I was right, and my first program that was born was a number guessing game. Ever since then I have held the same belief in programming: no matter how impossible something may seem, you can always push that one step further, and eventually it will be conquered.
In terms of software development, I am more of a hobbyist programmer who likes to design code that not only works, but works well. I am quite picky about speed performance, because I hold the belief that one day all systems will be able to be interacted with in real time. As an aside, I also do some occasional technical writing such as short papers (either technical or opinion) about technologies, I maintain my blog with mostly technical software releases and occasionally submit general articles to Helium. My main ongoing project is a video game engine in Java, which is a project that I will work on indefinitely (I like to use it to sharpen my skills or play around with new ideas), along with a variety of other projects that I pick up (and drop) from time to time.
In terms of skills, I feel I’m fairly qualified to speak in technical terms and to talk about products, as I do lots of beta testing (VLC, Firefox, Windows 7, Google Chrome, Filezilla) and like to log mostly feature bugs. I am knowledgeable in C/C++, Java, VB6, Visual Basic .Net, x86 Assembler, PHP, XHTML/XML/CSS, Perl, Turing (if you consider it a language), and I’m always learning new languages. As of right now I am focusing on perfecting my skills in C#/F# (a new Microsoft development language buit on .Net), Perl and CGI. As well as programming and beta testing, I like to participate in active IRC discussions and on forums.
After finishing my Computer Science undergrad (along with several minors), I hope to continue on to graduate level studies in Computer Science, particularly in Parallel Computing (I read so much about hypervisors, virtual machines and emulation, which I find fascinating) or possibly in Artificial Intelligence (more likely along the lines of how we can make a process in a computer more aware and smarter in dealing with resources, not iRobot style). But that is years away, leaving me with plenty of time to explore now.
For all you security people out there, here is my public GnuPG key to send me encrypted messages:
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