Hi!
My name is Ryan D’souza and I am currently a Junior at Princeton High School, Princeton NJ.
I’m primarily interested in Computer Science, Economics, and Finance with a focus in the financial computing area, where the three disciplines intersect.
Computer Science:
Some of my favorite childhood memories involve me showing my family, namely my parents, how to use new technology (ie. cameras). It made me feel like a genius. I was mainly interested in the software part of technology; I was more interested in playing around with the settings to make it do what I wanted it to do then taking apart the camera, although I did love building things with legos.
When my family got an HP Compaq when I was in 6th grade, I used to hog it all the time, not necessarily for work, but to explore.
After a couple of years, my family upgraded to the 15″ 2009 Mac Book Pro, after I spent hours convincing/persuading them to choose (Mac) OS over Windows.
That too, I continued to hog, even getting up an hour or two before I was supposed to wake up, to browse and play around on the computer. At this point, I was still teaching new technology to my parents and explaining how to do tasks to both teachers and friends at school.
In 8th grade Industrial Arts, one of our projects was to build a Lego robot, attach sensors, and program it to finish an obstacle course without touching the obstacles by using the sensors. The programming itself was very basic, we basically had to draw out what we wanted to do by placing pictures of the robot’s parts in a line (right engine connected by a line to front sensor connected by a line to the brake). Although it was very easy ‘programming’ it was all that I knew, so I always came in during lunch and recess to ‘program’ the robot.
That brings me to my Freshman year at Princeton High School. Although I didn’t get into the Computer Science classes that I wanted because of scheduling conflicts, I began learning HTML by myself using W3 Schools. My High School Computer Science teacher organized a program with the neighboring Princeton University Computer Science Undergraduate students to come to the high school and teach us programming (Java). I attended those after school sessions at the high school, practiced everything at the school, and then came home and practiced it again on my home laptop, showing my parents everything.
That 9th grade summer, I took a Java with Business Applications course at Mercer College. I got my first programming textbook and had my first programming course, and I was hooked. Even though the students in my class frequented the answer key because of laziness, I always attempted and finished the program myself before seeing how the book’s authors did it. Shortly there after I began learning AppleScript and wrote a couple apps, including a time-saving script that would open a Word Document, type my name, the current date, assignment title, and class, bold all of it, and save it with the assignment title in its respective class folder in Dropbox.
In 10th grade, I was put into Accelerated Java because of scheduling conflicts. Although I was upset I had to program with ‘noobs’ I continued to delve further into Java, mainly GUIs. By the end of the year, I developed a small Java app with a GUI that parsed the Internet for the current stock price of a stock, downloaded the CSV chart from Yahoo Finance, and graphed the last 5 days prices. I also learned how to use Advanced Excel functions, like Macros & VBA. I helped my friend Adrian Hertel with our Princeton Tiger Tech Community Service Group, in which we fixed iPhones, Droid phones, and all kinds of laptops, free of service charge. We also installed software and gave tutorials to those in need.
Over the summer, I dabbled with C++ and JavaScript before ultimately deciding to stick with Java and learn Android programming. I began converting my stock price graphing Java GUI into an Android app, but slowed down my work in the beginning of the school year because I joined the robotics club and Ultimate Frisbee club. When it began to get to cold to play frisbee outside, my friends and I created a Computer Programming Competition team to compete in solving problems at Computer Science competitions, namely the PClassic, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Dining Philosophers. Since then, I’ve started three other Android projects: a PowerSchool client, an Alarm Clock app, and a secret one that I’ve partially built but am waiting to rebuild it at a hack-a-thon.
Adrian Hertel got me Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne’s Algorithms Book in Java, the textbook used in Princeton University’s Algorithms 1 class. I plan to post some code/algorithms from that book here.
On this site, I also plan to post solutions and explanations to Computer Science Competitions and snippets of code/algorithms I learned.
I’m still using my 15″ 2009 MacbookPro although I’ve maxed out the RAM (8GB) and got a 500GB Solid State Drive.
Ryan D'souza 