Introduction
You have arrived at rgochee.com, home to the website of Ryan Gochee.
About me
Yo. I'm Ryan Gochee. Mid 30s. UCLA alumnus, Computer Science and Mathematics majors. Grew up in Southern California, home of amazing weather. Now living in NYC, home of amazing weather 20% of the time. I work, I eat, I sleep, I sometimes do other things.
Things I like
Having fun. Meeting fun people. Games. Board games. Music-based games. Music in general. Musicals. Playing musical instruments. Riding my bike. Playing sports, but I'm really bad at all of them. Snowboarding. Skiing. Rock climbing. Volleyball. Racquetball. Tennis. Slacklining. Exercising. Being healthy. Not necessarily eating healthy. Staying up late, sometimes. Waking up early, sometimes. Not both in the same 24-hour period. Figuring out the solution to a math proof (QED). Finishing a computer programming project, not that that ever happens. Walking aimlessly and exploring new places. Taking random turns while driving just because I can. Maps. Seeing nature. Seeing cities. Taking pictures of skylines. Traveling. Eating. Eating while traveling. Trying new places to eat. Dark chocolate. Tea. Boba, but often without the boba. Puns and wordplay. Languages and linguistics. Probably more stuff.
Stuff I've done
Here's a link to my github page. There's a pretty laughable class project there (eForms). I mean, it's ok, but I'm not too proud of it. I mean, it's in PHP. I've got some play code called tictactoe. Done in C++, I wanted to abstract the game to very basic elements so as to be able to generalize it into variations, mostly gomoku, quantum tic tac toe, ultimate tic tac toe, etc. But of course it doesn't work right now. Finally qr.js. One of the projects that I actually got decently far into. It's a functional QR code creator in javascript. Fully functional, but pretty poorly designed. I blame Javascript, both my lack of experience and the language itself. Next step is Data Matrix support, and Aztec Code if I can grab the spec. Will I finish that part? I dunno. Anyway, Press the button and scan the time. Finally, I like doing logic puzzles. I think prolog is cool. I wrote a solver for skyscrapers.
I participated in the 2009 and 2010 William Lowell Putnam Competitions. I got 19 and 29 respectively. The top score is 120. So you could say I didn't even get 25% correct. I think I did ok.
Programming
At school, I studied how to program. At my first job after school, I messed around with programs and tell people why their program sucks. That was basically my job as a QA engineer.
I guess I'm best at C++, simply because that's the main thing I work with. All programming languages are alike, though, once you abstract out enough of the details. Sometimes you just have to do more abstractions. I guess this is where studying math helped. Probably not really.
While working as QA, I got better with finding pitfalls in other people's code. Well, with my own too, I guess, but I often end up writing a comment e.g. // TODO: this will crash and then not fixing it often. If you saw my code snippets linked above, you'd understand.
I moved on to work with Windows drivers. They're interesting. I tried making one from scratch. It worked. I could easily make it blue screen. Well, maybe it didn't exactly work, but it could load/unload/accept controls/crash on command/crash not on command. After some time, I was able to do it better. Less crashing.
Currently working on the Linux side again. It turns out that moving files from one place to another can get tricky at large scale.
Infrastructure, refactoring, and scalability projects are fascinating to me. Clearly, also, I suck at UI.
I like being able to learn something new just about every day.
This website
Not to sound "hipster", but I wrote a blog before it was cool (using PHP and probably rife with security vulnerabilities). Then I never updated it. So I killed it. This is the replacement. Much simpler.
I'm not a designer. I know what looks good and what doesn't. I just can't make things look good on my own. I've mostly given up on making this look good (for now). I only tested this in Chrome. Why are you even here? Who are you?
I did make this site somewhat mobile-friendly. Mostly because I was curious how it looked on my phone and it was tiny text, weird width, etc. I fixed that, and in the process I was reminded of the early days of IE (4, 5, 5.5, 6) Firefox, Opera, and all the other browsers. I remember trying to make a simple website look good in them all, and doing this across multiple operating systems. One can start to understand why tables and frames were so commonly used. I daresay it's worse now, but I'm not a front-end web developer--arguably for this reason.
Music
I started piano when I was four. Piano is fun. I want a grand piano. I need a place to put it though...
I played recorder in middle school. It was fun. I later ended up performing in an awesome recorder trio. We practiced once before that recording. None of us really play it with much passion. But it's fun.
I started trumpet in high school. I sucked at it. It sounded like white noise. And I had no range. I definitely did my fair share of practicing. No go. I guess the braces probably didn't help, though. I actually own a trumpet now, and I play it every once in awhile. I no longer have braces. I surprisingly sound all right. Not good, though. For some reason, it seems like all trumpet music is really high.
Eventually, I moved to trombone. By the first hour, I sounded better on trombone than I did on trumpet after a year and a half. And it's fun to play random stuff. I now own one. I play it once or twice a week. Good investment.
I've got a pBone mini in blue. Perfect pitch makes it annoying to switch positions, but at least Bb trumpet prepped me for transposing instruments. Related, I want a C and Eb/D trumpet as well as a french horn (in F), probably because I'm going to hate learning and then mentally associating new (old) fingerings. I own a piccolo trombone. I want a piccolino trombone. And a euphonium. Not a baritone.
I had played around with an alto saxophone. It's pretty fun. The Eb thing isn't so bad -- pretend like it's bass clef and add 3 sharps. I've also played around with a tenor sax (though I do not own one). Luckily, I got through Bb treble with trumpet.
I have a basic student model clarinet. It's basically alto sax on the low register, soprano sax on the high register, weird fingerings in between and on the ends, and a lot less forgiving of an embouchure.
I have a guitar and ukelele. Stringed instruments are difficult for me, but I haven't put much effort into it. I attempted to play cello in high school. I own a cheap violin I bought from Amazon. Apparently, I needed to add a lot of rosin to actually make noise. A lot. It was really cheap. Also, I really want to learn to play harp.
I acquired a cheap flute. No B foot. Closed hole. Inline G. It was very cheap. My impression is that flute is just brass overtones combined with woodwind fingerings, i.e. the worst of both worlds. Relatedly, I received an ocarina. It's basically a flute, but out of tune, though with how I play flute, that's not much of a differentiation.
For fun, I have tried playing a bassoon. I now wish to own a bassoon. My thumbs and pinky fingers really need exercise. Why are the fingerings so weird?
One of my eventual goals is to gather a variety of instruments and become somewhat proficient in all of them. And then I can be one of them cool youtube performers who record themselves on different instruments to play some random song. Perhaps I'll attempt Holst's First Suite in Eb.
I own a melodica. 37 keys.
Does a pBuzz count as an instrument?.
Languages
I've always been interested in languages. When I was younger, I wanted to learn as many languages as possible. And years later, that never happened. Sometime in high school, I settled on 4 languages that I wanted to be able to have proficiency in. I will arbitrarily use the ILR scale to talk about my language capabilities.
English: native speaker.
Filipino: 1L/1R/0+S/0+W. Comprehension better than production. Helps that modern Filipino has a bunch of loan words from English/Spanish.
Spanish: 1L/1+R/1S/1+W. I took many many many years of classes during school starting at least 4th grade. This culminated with taking AP Spanish in 11th grade and receiving a 2. I think back then, my levels would be 1+/2 (speaking might still be a 1). Lack of use has caused this skill to wane. Turns out that even now I can figure out the correct grammar very well given a multiple choice test. Turns out most utilities of language do not involve taking multiple choice tests.
Japanese: 1+L/1+R/1+S/1+W. I had early interest in this (thanks anime). It's my current focus.
Once the above are at 2+/3 levels, I may step into learning other languages. I might try to learn French in Spanish, or Korean through Japanese. Maybe Chinese (Mandarin?), German, Arabic, Russian?
Places I've visited
US Territories: California. Nevada. Washington. Louisiana. Arizona. Colorado. New York. New Jersey. Maryland. District of Columbia. Illinois. Florida (Or-laan-doo). Pennsylvania. Massachusetts. Utah. Oregon. Vermont. New Hampshire. Connecticut. Minnesota.
Countries: Mexico. Philippines. Australia. Canada (poutine!). Japan. Hong Kong (aka the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China?). Spain. Qatar. Singapore. South Korea. Malaysia.
To be on this list, I must have touched my foot (or shoe) on the ground, outside. Otherwise, I would be able to add Hawaii (in a plane), Delaware (in a car), and Texas (in an airport) to this list. The amount of actual exploration done in each territory may vary. I want to travel more.
