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