About
My name is Edmond Ho. I write software for a living and for pleasure.
So far in my career, I’ve worked on a fairly wide variety of projects using a fairly wide variety of languages on a fairly wide variety of platforms; some of these projects are described below.
Here follows my brief reminisces with respect to programming so far:
The first program I remember writing was a pretty nifty little Logo program that I wrote sometime in elementary school, on the classroom Apple II. Though that program is now regretably lost in the big bit bucket in the sky, I do remember it drew a rather snazzy (though woefully inaccurate) picture of the New York skyline.
Aside from brief flirtations with Lego Logo later in elementary school and HyperCard in middle school, I didn’t really write anything else until high school in the mid- to late-90s, when the World Wide Web was becoming popular.
Under the influence of one of my favorite teachers, I spent hours and hours making webpages. (Thankfully, most of those early efforts have been lost — I shudder to think how they would look to modern eyes.) Back in those days, hitting “View Source” to learn HTML — and eventually CSS and JavaScript — and fooling around with Photoshop was all great fun. Web design was the first way I explored my interest in graphic design and user interfaces. I even got a summer job doing it, which paid for my first laptop.
Eventually, though, the novelty wore off a little, and I shifted my attention to what I considered more “serious” programming. I was very fortunate to be able to do just that as a computer science student at Stanford University, along with a little art history.
After graduating in 2004, I wrote a small video game, worked as system specialist on financial enterprise software, experimented with graphics programming in my spare time, and then co-founded a small business, as well as a few other sundry projects on the side.
I’m most interested in application-level software development, although I am rather curious about systems-level and network programming as well. Recently, as Director of Technology at Ravel Virtual Studios, I’ve been most involved in writing bespoke Mac OS X applications and in web development. I’ve recently found my interest for web development rekindled, in light of the rather impressive capabilities of HTML5, AJAX, and modern JavaScript.
My personal ambition as a programmer is to one day write the Great American Video Game; it’s probably better to leave the Great American Novel to the writers. Someday...
Until then, there’s always something to learn about programming, and I still have a lot to learn — sometimes it’s frustrating, but it’s incredibly exciting more often than not. In the end, I can’t imagine doing anything else.
