TableOfContents

Short Auto Biography

• I am currently 16 years old and was born May 8^th, 1990 in Brockville Ontario, Canada. I became interested in computers and programming in Grade 6 when I started to play with databases. I started programming in grade 7 with QBasic, but got bored very fast because I could not do very much with it. Then I switched to a programming language called Turing made by Holt Software. I was also very displeased with it and lost interest in programming. Then in the spring of grade 8, I heard about Java from a student taking grade 11 computer science at my high school; after some investigation I found this was the language for me. At that time I often came home from school and would sit down for four to six hours of learning and programming. After a few months I was able to move onto Swing applications - I created a simple Notepad and programmed a Diary for my little sisters. Over my grade 9 to 10 summer I worked full time at Elite Machine and Gear Inc. (a small automation company). Although the job was not my preference I worked very, very hard and was rewarded with a $300 bonus and over $1.50 in raises. Mid-way through the summer I started designing the new Diary version 2. This was when I switched to NetBeans. I had worked with it a little, as well as Eclipse, but I did not understand all of its features. At this time I also bought my first Java book. At the end of the summer i had the book read completely through and was ready for more. School started and I was enrolled in the grade 11 computer science and grade 11 computer engineering; both subjects I love. I promoted Netbeans throughout my computer science class and anywhere i could. In December of 2006 i attended the NetBeans world tour in Toronto Ontario (Canada). Later on in about February of the same year i was interviewed by Sun Microsystems about my involvement in the NetBeans project. You can read the complete interview [http://www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/collin-doering-interview.html here]. Unforchunatly I have basically stopped the development of Diary 2 because of school and I lost interest, was learning ant and accidentally cleaned my source directory that I had not committed to subversion for about a month so I ended up loosing over 2500 lines of code. Also I was writing a plugin engine and found that I could use the Netbeans platform since it had all the functionality I needed, not to mention there was not a large user group. As of late, I have been receiving a email here and there about the project and when a new release is going to come out so I might revive the project but rebuild it on the Netbeans platform. After becoming fond of computers, programming (specifically Java with Netbeans) I was introduced to the linux operating system by a older friend named Scott Morris. I first installed it in grade 10 but did start using it full time until June of 2006 (the end of grade 10) although i dual booted windows XP and SuSE 9.1 for many months before making the switch to Ubuntu full time. Now I use Ubuntu 6.10 only and have been windows free since June 2006. In my little time using linux I have seen amazing improvement and innovation thus i decided to support Open-Source even more so then i did before NetBeans. I refuse to use proprietary software (unfortunately i am forced to under some occasions; for example ATI's proprietary fglrx graphics driver).

My Lusted Knowledge

Since coming to linux I have wanted to learn many new things and have [#books_owned acquired many new books] and [#books_to_get intend to own many more]. Topics I would like to learn include:

• C programming
• C++ programming
• some scripting languages like python, javascript, ruby on rails, groovy, beanshell, and others
• C# programming and mono
• linux API's including WINE API, glibc, the kernel API, gtk+ API's (including C++ interfaces (gtkmm)), pygtk, and others
• J2ME
• J2EE
• Web services and website administration
• Hardware and schematic design

Books

Anchor(books_owned)

Books I Own

Anchor(books_to_get)

Books I intend to Own

I am currently 16 years old and live near Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I am a young hacker who knows java, and have been learning C/C++, glibc, the kernel API, and WINE API's. I am totally against closed-source software and strongly dislike windows, especially in comparison to Linux (I also now hate Novell because of their agreement with Microsoft). I am looking to contribute to Open-Source software and have been interviewed by Sun Microsystems about their open-source IDE NetBeans (see the interview here: http://www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/collin-doering-interview.html). For more information about myself visit the following:

http://rekahsoft.blogspot.com <--my blog http://claimid.com/rekahsoft <--my claimid site (my claimid has everything about me on it so feel free to explorer)

Note: more information to come [Under Construction]