Mr Whitesell

I was going through some of my old archived folders and stumbled upon an e-mail I sent to Mr.Whitesell. My first programming teacher. While I wont comment much on it I felt it would be appropriate to put it on the web.

Dear Mr. Whitesell,
I’m not sure if you received my e-mail on my project because I never got a reply from you confirming so. So please let me know if you have and if it worked ok.
Also I’ve realized that I haven’t sent you my address book program which turned out nicely. It has its own font, and a lot of extra features even a calendar that reads days of the week. Well I’ve included that program in the attachment just in case.
I wanted to thank you for the great year. I’ve really improved as a programmer. I’m not going to stop here, and over this summer I’ve set a goal to learn C++ and become fairly fluent in it. I’m also going to get better in Maya (a 3D Rendering Program), Flash (generally I’m good with it now but I plan to make my web site in it this time around). I’m letting you know this for the independent studies class. Besides maintaining the school web site we will also be able to take individual projects, correct? Well my ambitious goal for next year is to create a 3D demo. I want to learn how to create real 3D environments and maybe move into physics and so forth. This will ultimately lead me into creating my first 3D game. Which I believe I’ll continue in the fighting genre, since I should be fluent with Maya by then, or in fact I am at this point I can create my own 3D models and later learn a 3D api like DirectX or OpenGL to export those models into code. This ambitious goal can not be possible within one year unless I start learning C++ today. This is why I want to learn as much as there is to learn in a short period of time of 2 month. I’ve purchased a book, which will help me move along, and created an organized schedule to help me in making consistent progress. If you’re wondering why not wait, learn C++ next year, and then create 3D environment the following year. Simply by the following summer I want to start on a real game and try to actually publish it. While this seems way to unrealistic, especially for a high school student, others have done it and succeeded. Granted most worked in teams of at least three. I hope to find others who are just as interested in the programming and inspire them to work with me. Another thought that may come to mind why even bother to release a game. I want to attend MIT, that’s my dream, while I might not fit some of the criteria for the school yet by being the top student in the school (these guys have 92% of the kids at top 5% class rank, and 100% are at top 10% in class rank). That seems almost impossible, but I’m going to try my best for it. While my grades alone wont get me excepted I have to show them that I’m dedicated, and want to succeed. I’ll be able to accomplish this by showing what I’ve done. Creating some sort of visual portfolio for them to look at. This same idea may interest others (maybe others in independent studies class).
This goal is out of reach now but I can do it if I try hard enough. I’ve already taken classes at bucks in order to transfer into Hon Analysis. Analysis will also hopefully give me a better grasp of a few complex programming concepts. Well besides that goal that I have for the independent studies course we’ll also be working on the school web site. I have allot of experience on web design. While I don’t have a site up just yet, I’ve been doing web design for 7 years. Meaning since I was nine and the internet first became available to the general public (money wise). I created countless web sites slowly improving, I quickly mastered HTML, and within a year I memorized every tag. Which may be impressive and may be not, but slowly improved with each site I created, or redesigned. I became obsessed with good design. I have fluency in most graphics programs including Photoshop, Paint Shop, Illustrator, and Flash. Next year I think it would be interesting to take the south web site and make it very sophisticated. Flash animated, create a tour guide, launch a forum (I know CGI/Perl, and Henry knows PHP so whatever you prefer). Actually I think a forum would be really nice. One it could provide a place where people from south can talk freely, ask what last nights hw was or even talk with teachers about certain assignments. I mean not all teachers are enthusiastic about releasing their e-mail addresses. So I thought that would be clever. If you’re interested I’ll be more than happy to show you some of my past work, while it’s over a year old at the moment it’s still pretty good. I would like the honors to help redesign the school web site to invite more students to visit it. It’s pretty heavy in content right now, but there is no realistic reason for many students to visit except maybe use class links if they don’t know how to install it as a shortcut on the desktop. Why not release articles and tutorials like that to students, maybe combine with the newspaper club and have them post up news and events at council rock (unless you want us to do it). It’s not very hard to make a simple news script for people who are illiterate in programming to use. Yes with all these features comes the threat of being hacked because it may get so much attention. But I’m sure that things like that can be avoided. Anyway these are just rambles about next year. It’s been a real learning experience.

I was sort of young and stupid but I'll never forget my first programming teacher. Take care Mr. Whitesell!