for now, this part will be fairly brief until i have a style that I like
My name is Carson Wardlow. I attended Fairfield High School in Fairfield Township, Ohio, class of 2024.
I got into computer science somewhere around late middle school to early high school when me and some of my friends would mess around with game code on Roblox. LuaR was the first language that I ever engaged with. I believe that was the gateway that got me into computer science. After having continued to mess with game code over the years, I decided to take a general engineering and robotics course where we covered thins like bread boards and building with VEX kits. I distinctly remember as a final project building and programming a small elevator that had three floors, which had to be programmed by myself. My teammate for the most part handled the physical construction. If I recall correctly, it had to be programmed in RobotC. After that, I took an introductory programming course where we covered basic Python and some SQL.
After finding myself enjoying that class, I decided to, on a whim, apply to the University of Cincinnati's Computer Science curriculum as well as Dr. Edward Prather's Summer Bridge program that also took place at UC. It was a six week long program wherein we take shortened versions of the courses that we would take in the first semester in the freshman year. Among those courses was ENED, where we covered the basics of python. Since I already had experience with python, I focused on trying to help others since it was a mandatory class for all majors, even those that don't have much to do with programming at all.
Throughout my first year of college, outside of classes I would begin to explore the GNU/Linux operating systems. I had a laptop with a corrupted HDD, so I also had my first interaction with hardware back then as well. After getting a new M.2 SSD and a 2TB 2.5" HDD, I would install Linux Mint on it, and then would hop to Debian 12. It served a couple of purposes in my dorm room, first of which was to be a fun thing I can do outside of class. In short, it was a computer that I can use to expose myself to Linux as a whole. At the time, I still couldn't imagine switching off of Windows. As time would tell though, I becamse more and more interested in Linux and would ultimately switch my main computer to use Fedora Linux. At the time, it was the only normal choice for me because I not only didn't feel that I was experienced enough for more complex systems, but also because (in my opinion) Fedora's handling of NVIDIA drivers (nvidia-akmod) worked pretty well. After the end of my first semester in second year, I would switch my main computer to use Arch after having multiple frustrating moments where my intentions with Linux were conflicting with Fedora's ideology. I wanted to have both a fun time using Linux and be forced to learn Linux on my own. Fedora KDE is good in that it's very stable to work with, but it leaves little room for in depth customization or learning opportunities that come with broken things or issues that Arch has.