Jack Gambrell
Firmware Test Developer at Seagate
I knew I would one day be making a career out of writing code and developing software. It's always been a practical interest of mine, and I got into it as a hobby creating computer games. While there are a lot of things I am genuinly interested in, it has been clear for much of my life that writing code and solving coding-related problems are the kinds of challenges I can really get into and enjoy working at. I ended up going to school for a computer science degree and have obtained experience on my own time with my personal creative projects, obtained experience being a student grader for a Java data structures course, and have had professional development experience working for three amazing employers.
A game I'm working on called Space Soar.
I initially became interested in computers and software when I participated in a computer game creating program that was offered at my elementary school. We used a tool called GameMaker (which is now GameMaker Studio), and after this program ended I continued messing around with GameMaker and started teaching myself to code. The language I coded in is similar to C but has no type enforcement, similar to how JavaScript typing works. Called Game Maker Language (GML), I wrote code in it to control mechanics in the games I made.
I spent many years working mostly with Game Maker and became very skilled at writing code with all the basic funamental actions that drive scripts - boolean logic, if, if-else statements, for loops, while loops, do while loops, and switch statements, and blocks of code. I however did not understand object oriented programming and how many classes can work and act together or what it means for code to be compiled versus interpreted. GameMaker did however make limited use of objects and global methods and also introduced parent-child heirarchies amongst game objects.
