Tyler’s Workspace (Yes, that is a picture of a cave)
Could you start by telling me a little about yourself?
My name is Tyler Guidry, and I’m a 17 year old highschool student in Louisiana. I’m pretty much that one nerdy guy that everyone knows. You know, the one that fixes everyones computer problems when most of the time it just takes a few clicks in the control panel. I take honors, advanced placement, and, as of this year, dual enrollment courses.
At what age did you first start programming? What was your first language? What was it that piqued your interest?
I’ve attempted programming various times, but I only consider the start of my sophomore year to be the time when I really started programming. This was when I started taking computer science at school, the time that I started learning Java. Most people dislike Java, but I love it (I may be a little biased). The thing that piqued my interest? Semi-Malicious coding at school. I know, that does sound pretty bad now that I think about it. During my freshmen year, a couple of friends and I coded semi-malicious applescripts that were packaged as an app, or more specifically, a game. A lot of people kept air drop open in class, becuase it was common for people to send each other games. So we felt that it would only be appropriate that we airdopped them a game (hehe). As different games would become popular we would just change the app picture and name. Again, the “games” that we made contained an appleapplescript. There were different versions for different situations. One was perfect for those really queit times in class. When opened, it would play an audio file, and continuously increase the volume to max. I wish I would have thought to record the reactions, they were pretty great! Anyway, this is what first got me interested.
Do you plan on studying computer science in post secondary?
I plan on either studying computer science or something in the medical field. The latter never really appealed all that much until lately, when I discovered my joy in learning the detailed systems of the human body in Biology II. I currently have a 101.99% in the class, which I have never done before.
Are you working on any projects at the moment? What hurdles have you had to overcome?
Well Faisal Misle (a great guy!) and Rackspace (the best cloud hosting company) helped me get a server up to host a personal site. That was my most recent project. I would say the most difficult part was having to learn some of the syntax of Centos 6.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve had since you’ve started programming? What did you do to try and solve the problem? What were the results?
I’ve never really had many issues other than the simple ones that Stack Overflow solved. I suppose manually setting up LAMP on the server without knowing most of the syntax needed was the most difficult code-oriented challenge I’ve had lately. How did I solve it? Lots of googling and help from Faisal or course :). One night I believe we were in a google hangout for around 8 hours just messing around with differerent things on our servers!
Anything else you’d like to add?
I have typed this entire document on my phone before class, so don’t judge the grammar and what not too harshly lol. Other than that? Stay classy.
Words of wisdom from Tyler this week! As for the workspace photo at the top of the interview, he sent me that this way and I thought it was awesome!
As always, feel free to contact Kaleb if you’d like to be featured. Posts come out Thursday mornings every two weeks.