About Me
Hi there, I'm Chris Ho. I'm a programmer.
When I was just a little tyke, I thought video games were amazing. I once opened up my NES, and was disappointed that I could make neither heads nor tails of what was inside. I was also rather anxious about putting it back together correctly. Thankfully, I managed to return everything to its proper place.
But I was still intrigued. How did a bunch of wierd looking boards make video games?
I didn't find out the answer for a long time. I was probably too busy trying to squeeze every momemt of my free time into video games. But then, my parents bought a computer.
It was amazing! It was like a video game without the game. It had all the interaction, and as far as I could tell, was also full of boring green stuff. Of course, being rather single-minded, I was soon playing computer games instead of video games. Ah, Doom.
Then my cousin brought over CodeWarrior and showed me my very first "Hello World." My little kid mind? Completely blown. Things were never quite the same. Rather than spend my time in the bookstore flipping through strategy guides I now flipped through what seemed to be giant tomes of programming. Rather than spend all day playing video games, I spent some time playing video games, and the rest poking at various programming languages, trying to figure out how to use them.
Fast forward. I've graduated college with a degree in computer science (and a degree in Philosophy, but let's not split hairs here). I've switched from spending most of my time playing video games to spending most of my time writing code. Or thinking about code. Or reading about programming. Or reading about other people programming. Sure, I still love play video games, but there's an added academic interest in it now: how did they get that to work? Why is does this game's physics feel so much better than that other games?
One day I hope to write my own game engine. To have someone sit down and play go "oooh, pretty" and feel the warm fuzzies as they have a good time. Granted, I've diverged a bit as I've spent a couple of years now working in a research lab specializing in visualization, but I hope to get back on the dream track soon.
So that's who I am. A programmer. A gamer. A game(r) programmer.