Some Information
About me
My name is Don. I'm currently an engineering student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), pursuing by Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering. 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 experimented with many other programming languages, including Python and JavaScript. Along the way, I realized that I preferred languages that are strongly typed and relatively close to the hardware, while still being high-level enough to remain productive like C or C++.
Over time, I also found myself increasingly drawn to the engineering side of computing: computer architecture, control systems, signal processing, and related fields, which ultimately led to my choice of major in college.
Most of my programming experience has been in the aerospace industry, where I've worked with control systems, digital image processing, GPUs, and computer graphics. I also enjoy mathematics, particularly partial differential equations (PDEs) and numerical analysis. Outside of engineering, I spend my time hiking in national parks, working on this website, and photography.
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 was 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, then later migrated everything to Astro, a static site generator that still allows for the same level of customization as plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Question: Why not use a framework or a static site generator initially?
- Answer: My impression was that static site generators can limit your control over certain parts of a website, especially when creating highly customized components that can't be built with Markdown or MDX alone. Astro addresses this by allowing you to create custom components with .astro files, giving you much more control over the structure, styling, and behavior of your site.
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.