Some Information
About me
A little bit of detail
My name is Don. I'm currently an engineering student at UCLA, pursuing by Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, with a technical breadth in Mathematics. If you want to know more about my curriculum and professional experiences, please check out my portfolio and cv at ddonle.com or my Linkedin.
Is that all you have to say about computer science?
Of course not. Here's a bit more to my story:
At the age of 15, I was introduced to computers and programming after inheriting my first laptop from my older brother. I wrote my first few lines of code in C, starting with a simple script to solve quadratic and cubic equations, and then an unsuccessful attempt at solving the quartic. Soon after, I built a simple scientific calculator, a game of tic-tac-toe, followed by a basic version of Snake on the terminal.
Throughout my teenage years, I've tried many other programming languages (like Python or JavaScript), but it turns out I prefer languages that are strongly typed, closer to the hardware, yet high-level enough to be productive like C or C++, and most recently, Rust. Overtime, I also found myself drawn slightly more to the engineering side of computers (i.e. computer architecture, digital systems, signal processing, etc.) which ultimately led to my choice of major in college.
The majority of my programming experience is in C and C++, primarily within the aerospace industry and in the fields of image processing, SLAM, GPUs, and computer graphics. While I have worked in web development, it is not my main focus. I enjoy programming in general, but I am particularly drawn to low-level and systems programming.
About this website
Background and choice of design
I started digging through the internet back in middle school to collect and read scientific textbooks. While doing so, I couldn't help but encounter a lot of interesting computer science and math blogs. I got inspired by some of them and eventually decided to create this website: a place for me to upload my writings and projects. I primarily write about math, programming, and physics, and occasionally about topics like food reviews.
This website was formally built back in summer of 2024, but I've been writing a lot of the content on this website on LaTeX documentations way before that. I coded most of the current functionalities of this website from scratch using HTML, CSS, and vanilla Javascript. Because of this approach, the site was not very well optimized or scalable, and it can sometimes be a bit slow. To fix this issue, I later migrated everything to Astro, a static site generator that still allows for the same level of customization as plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To view the source code, click on the logo on the side navigation bar or follow this link.
- Question: Why not use a framework or a static site generator initially?
- Answer: My impression is that static site generators give you less direct control over certain aspects of the site, especially when creating highly customizable components like the one shown below.
The Fourier transform of the impulse train is another impulse train:\[ \mathcal{F}\{\delta_T(t)\} = \frac{2\pi}{T}\sum_{k=-\infty}^{\infty} \delta(\omega - k\omega_s), \qquad \omega_s = \frac{2\pi}{T}. \]
or this one below (click on the arrow!)
Proof
The proof is left as an exercise to the reader.
However, later on, I discovered Astro, which let me do all the things above.
Structure
There are two types of blogs on this website: articles and posts. Articles are technical and focus specifically on topics in math, computer science, physics, or engineering. Posts, on the other hand, are shorter, usually non-technical, and primarily cover everyday niche topics.
Disclaimer
This website is private, and it was created solely to display my writings, projects, and personal things that are interesting to me; therefore, the quality of this website is subjective only to me. If you have any suggestions on how this website can be improved, or if you find any:
- wrong information,
- errors in the source code,
- contents that you are not happy about,
- spelling or grammar errors,
feel free to reach out to me using the email address below. Any feedback or thoughts about this website would be greatly appreciated.
I am also open for conversations, so if you just want to have a chat, you can reach out to me via discord or telegram.