Resume And Other Links

Studying

I study at the University of California at Irvine and hope to earn a Computer Science degree.

Writing

I write lots of programs. At the moment, I make things for the University of California, Irvine, WatiN, and personal projects. At the moment, one of projects is a multi-threaded class schedule generator. I also wrote a lot of XHTML, PHP, some Perl, and a shell script or two as the website director for Terrouge. Most of the XHTML came from converting articles into things that could be uploaded.

I also write a lot of articles about literature. I used to write for Terrouge and Going Deeper Still.

I make a concerted effort to improve as a writer. Most recently, I learned about was the Model-View-Controller pattern, especially when used with ASP .NET. I taught myself about unit tests (JUnit and NUnit), code coverage (NCover and the NetBeans code coverage plug-in), and test-driven development (TestDriven .NET). I also maintain a lengthy list of books to read so that I continue to improve as a writer. In addition, I regularly write for my personal blog.

In general, I seek out resources that help me explicitly develop as a writer such as Code Complete and Channel 9.

Editing

Since high school, I’ve always liked to read others’ work and tell them ways to improve, both big and small. This ranges from English to programming. When I was part of Bib-it, I read lots of code and was in the midst of refactoring the code and doing maintenance coding the project ended. Currently, I edit technical documentation for WatiN.

At Terrouge, I was Editor-in-Chief and edited about 2-4 articles per month. I was also the encoding coordinator and reviewed the encoders’ work to ensure that it met the site’s stylistic standards. As typesetting coordinator and editor-in-chief, I set and enforced standards such as using typographer’s quotation marks and relying on The Associated Press Stylebook to resolve ambiguities.

Designing

At the University of California, Irvine, I designed the online reservation system from paper & Post-it Notes to live XHTML and JavaScript, with some help from jQuery. I used human-computer interaction principles and constantly asked people to try using the website, whether that required people to click buttons by touching them with ballpoint pens or clicking a mouse.

The University has helped me become a good designer through the informatics classes that I attended. I continue to learn about good design through books, websites, and other media.

Managing

I’ve led organizations ranging from a high school Tutoring Center to an international literary magazine on the verge of death. Most of my recent leadership experience occurred at Terrouge. I joined the site after the Producer and Website Director resigned due to public outcry. I developed an application, background screen, and interview process that allowed us to grow to the point that we regularly published issues with over 6 articles.

Experience is a great teacher for managers though I try to avoid making others' mistakes by reading about them in books about business such as Good To Great and In Search Of Stupidity.

Playing

I love to play the piano. I also like to play the violin, though I am more proficient with the piano. I had terrific teachers ranging from my mother (a graduate of the USC Department of Music) to Michael Tseitlin.

I also ride my bicycle all over the place. On the weekend, I usually ride about 5 to 6 miles.

Personal research projects have included a rapid allergen detector for use by those with life-threatening allergies and a compiler and integrated development environment for simulated robots using a programming language derived from Java.

Although I only have a point-and-shoot camera, I take many photographs in my free time.

P.S. Old stuff from my Geocities webpage (http://www.geocities.com/zianchoy) is available.