Tech Application from Photoave12

Member Name Photoave12

Additional In Game Names: Photoave12

How old are you? 15

Location: USA (Pacific Timezone)

Do you have Teamspeak? yes (and Skype)

How many hours per day do you spend on Meepcraft? (average) 2-5

Have you ever been a Tech on a different server? no

References: Please give IGN's
cookie2monster2, KoalaKiddo, and Pandaswag148 (my town staff)

I have also talked with most of the current techs as well as some of the staff such as ladycass, muunkee and courtneyyy.

Introduction:
Hello, let me introduce myself,
My name is Adrian and I am from the pacific northwest. I have been enjoying meep for the past few years and I would really love to give back to the server on which I have spent so much of my time. But first, a little bit about me:

After I was born in the US, me and my family moved to the UK for some of my earlier years (which I can barely remember). However, one of the things that I do know is that ever since the day I was born, I have been curious, always discovering new ways to do things, like the time I put a plastic cup full of crayons onto a heater in order to melt the crayons. That was the day I found out that plastic also melts when heated. While this doesn’t happen very often nowadays, my curiosity occasionally gets me in huge trouble, like the time in elementary school when I wandered away from the group of other children at "outdoor school" in order to go filter rocks out of the sand pit.
My mom always tells me that when I was about five or six years old, one of my friends was having a birthday party and instead of being with everyone else, I was cruising the perimeter of the room, trying to unlock the "child proof" cupboards and drawers. Yeah, "Child proof" back then should have been called "everyone-but-adrian proof".
This curiosity has led me to do things I might never have done otherwise, such as spending money on circuitry components so I could experiment with electronics (to date I have shocked myself twice and burned out no less than five or six components). After being into electronics and circuitry for a few months, my sister got me an Arduino (a programmable microchip that can be wired to other electronics) for my birthday and thats when I discovered programming. Since you had to program the Arduino for it to do anything interesting, I began slowly teaching myself to use it using the free online documentation. This love for programming was also fueled by the support I received from my parents, including their decision to buy a family iMac when I was 11, as well as the numerous books and classes they have bought for me, in order to show their support for something that I clearly love.

Please describe your experience as a developer.
When I finally settled on programming as my primary hobby, I wanted to jump in head first, saving up to buy a $100 Apple developer license so I could write apps for my iPhone and hopefully the app store. Since then my programming skills have come a long way. This summer, it is my goal to finish my website and wrap up some unfinished side-projects so I can begin focusing on my primary goal, which is to write software that helps people. Throughout this journey I have become fluent in HTML and CSS and have also picked up some skills in languages such as PHP and Swift (formerly Objective-C from those early days of iOS development). I try to take classes and buy books on programming whenever I can, so as to fill in the gaps in my knowledge that I may not know I have. Last summer I took a Java class, mostly just so I could get to know people, thinking that I already knew everything, however, I ended up learning a lot about the structure of Java and how everything fits into place. Even though I know a lot about programming already, I don't plan to stop. In the future, I hope to teach myself languages like Python and C++ so I can broaden my sphere of influence and share my apps with as many people as I can.

I have even started helping meep out already! By taking on the task of creating better CAPS LOCK detection code that is less evadable, I have helped improve the environment and quality of gameplay on meep one small chunk of code at a time.

What programming languages are you familiar with?
Throughout my experience as a developer, I have built my own website using HTML, CSS and PHP, run scripts on that very same web server using bash, made many small apps and utilities for me and my friends using Swift and am even in the process of making a minecraft mod in Java, so as to save my friends on meepcraft that extra bit of sanity when they realize that they don’t have to keep switching between minecraft and Skype/TeamSpeak whenever a new message announces its presence.

What are you most proud of as your work as a developer?
Throughout my development experience, I have had opportunities to work on many different projects (mostly ones I came up with myself), however the one that stands out most to me, is my website (link below). I feel that, while I may still be at the beginning of my software development career, my website is the project I am most proud of, because it shows how I constantly change and revising things until they are perfect. Aside from my obvious perfectionism in making my website, I am also proud of it because it is my biggest and longest-lasting project (as you can see it is still under construction). While there have been times where I never used it, it has always been there as my little nerdy corner of the internet which I intend to turn into a single-page showcase of all my work as a developer.
My website was my first major project, and one that I hope I will never keep revising and adding to. It has taught me so much over the almost 15 years that I have owned it (most of this learning took place over the last five years, so in case you were wondering, no, I have not been a programmer since birth…)

How do you plan to enrich the experience of MeepCraft with your development contributions?
I am the kind of person who likes to perfect everything, the kind of person who notices the small things that can be fixed up and changed to add up to a better overall experience. Like when you're getting a 89.9% in a class and all you need is that extra 0.1% to get an A.

While I enjoy programming very much, I believe it comes with its drawbacks. Since I began programming, I have noticed myself spontaneously coming up with app ideas and ways to fix things and make them better for everyone. While this may be a useful trait to have, I have not yet found a way to turn it off, therefore I often suggest small things that could be fixed to improve the overall experience in order to give everyone an A+ experience. While my java knowledge is constantly growing, I feel that if I start out working on small projects, I will always try to take on bigger and bigger tasks as i gain more knowledge, even if I am not fully ready.

Do you have a GitHub account or personal website? If so, please provide the link(s) here.
Website (work in progress): www.adriancedwards.com/beta
GitHub projects: www.github.com/DeveloperACE

 

I'm going to fully -1.
While yes, you are a tech, and yes, we do need techs, there are issues.
You are very difficult to work with - you are very impatient. Extremely so. You cannot wait more than 5 minutes for something without bugging me about it, and when I say hang on you act like I'm the bad guy. Seriously, I only have two hands lol.

Next off, you are extremely desperate for a staff position. Wanting is good. Working is good. desperation, trying to mini-mod (mini-tech?) By trying to do things on your own and trying to annoy the staff team saying we should implement your stuff, it's just not good. you're constantly bugging people about your super awesome coding skills. It's just gotten annoying.

Overall, you need to mature up, become easier to work with, work on your patience, and just tbh chill out a little.

 

You can code? +1

We are so desperate to get something done. Look at trello for christs sake. It's a joke. I don't care whether you are immature or impatient, please just start working on some damn plugins.

 

Give Photoave something to try out his knowledge on to test him. I have never had a problem you in game, that's just my experience. I only care about how well you get on with other techs, being able to complete your tasks and as long as you're okay with the community when you speak to them you're golden mate. +1

 

You seem to have quite a bit of experience when it comes to coding and writing script. Although I'm not an expert in this field I can already assume that you have above average experience with it than most. You may seem power hungry but once you become a Tech that's going to change real quick.

Don't listen to all of the negative comments on here pointing out everything you did wrong in the first grade (metaphor). Take them as was to improve yourself or just plain out ignore them. Some people are just rude and annoying all the time. Good Luck, I'm sure you'll get it.

 

I agree with most points stated but most so with munkee. You're jumping into this too fast and while I'm sure you could bring support, I don't know if nows the time. Keep working, keep improving and good luck in the future.

-.5

 

are we just going to ignore how he applied 20 minutes after he was denied

-1
impatient
power hungry.

 

I requested that my helper application be denied so I could post this one. This is so I wouldn't have two applications open at once, which I'm pretty sure isn't allowed.

 

Well i have been speaking with you a bit in the past couple weeks, mostly about development stuff. I think that you possess a lot of really important qualities for a developer in general namely the hunger to always learn more and explore different parts of programming and how they work. I'm not sure that you are at a level that you would be comfortable working in an enviornment like Meep at this point and that's certainly not about your skills as a developer its more about personal traits such as patience. Your still young so this is to be expected really but thats some respectful criticism to help you improve like others have said. I'm not going to vote either way at this point but i am quite impressed with both your level of knowledge this early on and your want to learn. Keep learning, in the programming world nobody can ever know everything

 

i agree. i will definitely work on being more patient over these coming weeks as a lot of people have mentioned it. (one of my town staff was actually being a little impatient today and I now understand how annoying that can be, especially after having been the recipient of it).

I also think n00bslayer brings up a good point here:

I know this was probably meant as a joke, but I sort of agree with him because I believe I can improve upon the things like the immaturity and impatience that you guys have mentioned. I know now may not be the right time, but I am definitely looking forward to helping out the server sometime in the future.

 

I'm going to have to go with a -1, heres why:
-I tried to help you set up a bit of code for testing your "caps lock detection system" but you failed to get your code to work with my simple user input loop even after I put the code in chat for you to copy and paste and thoroughly explained how to use it.

-You are a bit of a show-off with your stuff. You put me in a conversation with all the techs trying to get your "caps lock detection system" implemented, although, the one that we have is fine with just a bit of moderation.

 

+.5. you seem qualified but weren't you just denied for helper? out of curiosity why were you denied for that? also even though I have been on and off of meep lately, I haven't seen you really on meep.

 

it great that you brought up that concern, however, to clarify, my helper app was denied because it was still pending approval at the time I wanted to post this tech application. I requested that it be denied so i didn't have two applications open at once, which I'm fairly certain isn't legal on meep (This is why my helper application says "denied by request").

it was not denied for any reason other than by my request.

hope that clears things up...

 

-1.

First of all, HTML and CSS are not programming languages. They are considered markup languages. When I last spoke to you, you had no experience with the Bukkit API, and that is just about mandatory for techs to know, not including other API's like Vault. Please take your time to learn how to actually code minecraft plugins and test them on a local host, to further hone your skills for developing MC plugins. Several things about the caps detection code that you have made. First off, toLowerCase() is not something that you made, as it's already something with regex. Second, there really isn't anything wrong with our current caps detection system.

I was with blendycat in that teamspeak channel when you were asking him how to do it, and it clearly was not understood easily by you, and took him at least 5-6 times to explain how to simply use regex.

I think the best option would be to just spend a little time, doesn't have to be *too* much, and just keep learning: from the Bukkit API to more advanced Java topics.

 

You seem pretty mature in teamspeak while in game I feel you are a lot younger. I do not believe you understand how dev-ing for a minecraft server works. Your caps lock plugin CERTAINLY doesn't. It's not hard to learn if you are determined so keep doing what you are doing and I'll change my minus one.
Keep trying to make things but don't irritate our techs. Save it for you next application!

 

+1
good attitude it appears, perhaps not amazingly qualified, but you will learn. If not, then please keep trying because we need techs.

 

Okay thanks man for the scarification. <3 Good luck.

 

+/- Honestly I do talk to photoave12 and have never know him to be impatient (well atleast towards me) I talk to him whenever hes on he does seem to be really into coding although I do not know his skills when it comes towards plugins or java, I did tell him to try learning java so that if and when he becomes tech the techs do not have to teach him from the ground up. He seems pretty mature when I talk to him both in team speak and minecraft

 

The point is, that you still have 0 experience making plugins. Meep does not need someone who makes mods, they need people who can edit, make, improve, fix plugins. From your github, it seems as though the only thing in Java that you have is the “MinecraftChatOverlay” which basically is minecraft decompiled, as you have spoken to me about. The only changes I have seen are setups for what you apparently are going to do with it. This is definitely not enough to show that you have the skills to be a developer, and certainly not what meepcraft is looking for.

The fact that you have not made a plugin yet also means that you have not spent enough time working with minecraft/bukkit. I would strongly suggest that you first work on learning, then apply.

 

Lordusan took the keys right out of my post. After skimming your application you seem to have plenty of experience with HTML/CSS but its not that huge of an accomplishment, no offense. MeepCraft is much more than simple markup languages because most plugins require their own API or the like, as lordusan said.

Prior to this application, you should have already had experience with the Bukkit API or at least something similar to creating plugins before you filled out and posted the application.

-1, even though I don't frequent Meep anymore, you wouldn't be a great addition to the tech team because of your inexperience.