I’m going to be looking for a job this summer, and so I’ve been looking at my resume.
It’s atrocious. I haven’t finished much.
But I’ve started a lot.
I’ve:
- Programmed two-player Pong on my calculator
- Built things with Swing that would have been better done in JS just because I didn’t know JS yet
- Tried to build multiplayer HTML5 games using Canvas and PHP/MySQL
- Built more than my fair share of non-functional Android apps (with a few functional ones thrown in)
- Built plenty of Bukkit (Minecraft server) mods only to discover that Bukkit’s plugin hosting
requires you to be 18 to use it
:( - Tried to build a Minecraft Classic server in node.js, only to find that the compressed level data packet has no useful documentation
- Built some things in Meteor
- Built a quasi-working DCPU-16 emulator in node.js
- Started trying to port my school’s iOS app to Android
Those things all sound useless, or at least impractical, but from each of those things I learned:
- How to use TI-BASIC, which I still use today, and how to write good programs in a bad language
- How to build everything in Swing, no matter whether or not it should be built in Swing
- How easy Canvas is to use, and how hard PHP and MySQL are to use
- How to write theoretically useful Android apps that don’t work (and also ones that do, but I’m not as good at that so far)
- How to write things in Java that make use of a plugin API
- How to use CoffeeScript and node.js
- How awesome Meteor is
:D, and how to do screenscraping to reformat an ugly website into a beautiful one, and how to use regexes without going permanently insane (useful skill to have, don’t you think?) - How CPUs work, and how to write unit tests for an emulator, and how to use continuous integration
- How to use JSON API endpoints from Android
I was making good progress on those, but here’s the current status of all of them:
- Lost the calculator
- Completely lost interest
- Ran out of steam and just gave up
- Hit a difficult spot and kept avoiding the project
- Java ZIP library backfired and erased my Eclipse workspace so I don’t have many of them
:( - Gave up at the level data packet
- Kept procrastinating finishing things
- Tried to figure out how to do keyboard input, then ragequit
- I can’t figure out how to use the Android builtin calendar API, so I gave up
I’m more talented than I appear. Despite what my track record demonstrates, I am capable of finishing things.
If you’d like to provide temporary employment to a 16-year-old with no formal work experience, email the obvious choice @gmail.com and I can get back to you.