About Me

About Me:

My name is Zac Szewczyk, and I’m sixteen years old. I’m a writer, web designer, programmer, and gamer, and I love to do each and every one of those things. I began blogging when I was eleven or twelve, and consider that to be my formal introduction to the internet and the world of computers and technology. Since then I have continued to learn new things and am constantly improving my skills in each of the areas I highlighted at the beginning of this page. On this blog I hope to be able to pass on some of the things I have learned since my “formal introduction to the internet and the world of computers and technology”. I hope you learn something while here, and that you’ll continue to come back every once in a while to check back for new posts.

A few specifics:

I am fluent in the following programming languages (And yes, I know that some of these are not technically considered programming languages):

• (X)HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Jquery
• Python
• C
• Perl
• Shell

And I have some experience in the following:

• Managing databases with MySQL
• AJAX

Besides that I do quite a bit of video editing and consequently am fairly good at that. And while I am not especially good at creating graphics, I am somewhat skilled at editing them once created and thus can handle editing more so than the creation.

My interests are as follows:

• I’m especially interested in programming, as you may have surmised from my list of the programming languages I am fluent in to varying degrees.
• I am also very interested in writing, and it is something that I do almost every day with few exceptions. I like to think that I am pretty good at writing too, though I do recognize that I have a long way to go before I am actually as good as I think I am.
• I am a very big music listener and enjoy my music immensely. I make frequent use of Last.fm and Pandora to discover new songs, and always listen to music while writing.
• Despite my enthusiasm in music, I also enjoy listening to podcasts whenever I am not writing. In fact, I listen to You Look Nice Today every night before going to bed. During the day though I listen to pretty much any podcast from 5by5. Seriously, go check out Hypercritical, Build & Analyze, and the Dev Show–three of my favorite podcasts, all from 5by5.
• I absolutely love anime. I believe Digimon was the first anime I had ever seen, along with classics such as Kiki’s Deliver Service and Pokemon, but I never really realized that those shows and movies were actually anime. I can’t say exactly what turned me on to anime, but I believe it was seeing an AMV (Anime Music Video) with the anime Bleach and the song I Will Not Bow by Breaking Benjamin. This video piqued my interest and since then I have been hooked. I am quite the fan today and have seen many anime shows–and to this date, I have not found a single anime that I have not liked.
• As I said earlier, I do quite a bit of video editing. This interest was spawned after I began watching AMVs on YouTube, and one day I just decided that I would like to try my hand at creating them. Since then I have made around 10 AMVs that I am fairly proud of, and through that process have become pretty good at editing videos. My primary video editor is VideoPad Video Editor, though I am trying to learn to use Sony Vegas Pro in order to become a better editor.

A couple other things.

I am a fairly competent programmer, as you may have guessed from the list of programming languages I made earlier. Seeing as three of the languages listed above are for creating websites, it would not have been innapropriate to assume that I am a fairly competent web designer. You would have been correct in that assumption. In fact, my friend and I attempted to step into the web design business a few years ago when we were approached with the request to build a website for a client. We built the website but have not done much for-pay web designing since then, though we have continued to become more skilled programmers. We hope to design some example pages sometime soon to showcase our skills and eventually get soem new clients, and one day possible expand the business. We’ll see.