Ben Xu | Developer

There was a day in 10th grade, when one of my friends introduced me to Java. I was enamored the moment I touched the keyboard. The actual program was cute little thing, reading and adding two numbers.

It blew my mind.

Now that I think about it, it fits; I had been enchanted by the power of words so I wanted to be a novelist,but then I found something even more powerful.

Either way, I had decided then and there that I knew that I wanted to program for a living. And now I'm here, seeking to live a life programming and architecting solutions.

I've picked up a lot of different skills since that day. I developed a custom Wordpress theme and wrote a chatlog for my English class. In my last year of high school, I learned about automata theory.

When I came to college, I wrote part of an OS in no-std C++ and a Python frontend for connecting to a server and testing. I fell in love with writing tools and performance-critical programming.

I've written (with a friend) a ray tracer, a fluid simulation, and a shattering simulation. I am slowly working on a simulation in Rust that combines a majority of these concepts, as well as networking the simulation to not only make it interactable but capable of being shared across the network.

C, C++, and Rust are my favorite languages. I have worked in both OpenGl and Vulkan. I've dabbled with Unity, Godot, and Unreal; Amethyst sounds interesting as well. However, I also enjoy gaming and reading in my spare time, as well as learning even more about tech and interesting projects such as WASM, xi, TypeScript, Fuschia, and AR glasses.

As a note, just for fun, this entire website is built with Rust + WASM (Such a fun word. Anyways...). I don't know how many browsers it runs on, but it was definitely fun.

I focus on systems development, rendering, and physical simulation. I think I've already said enough about that. But I also have a string interest in game development and story writing.

In fact, by virtue of NaNoWriMo, I have the first version of my novel finished!

Speaking of wriing, I love to read as well. Brandon Sanderson's my favorite author, but Patrick Rothfuss is the most inspirational one—still waiting for The Doors of Stone. (It's alright. We've only waited for a decade-ish.)

Rothfuss is the one who inspired me to write, so I aim to take just as long as him to finish my stories. But, actually, the subtelty and detailed foreshadowing in his work is mind boggling. As I attempt to do the same, I realize this all the more.

Games are the other half of my free time. Shooters are good as stress relief but my favorites are RPGs. My favorite, however, is The Last of Us. It is a work of art. NieR: Automata comes in at a close second and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has soared into my shortlist.

The favorites I'd listed are RPGs, but I find myself more engrossed in Terraria and Stellaris than RPGs since they leave a lot of room to establish a character and role play despite not being an RPG. Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) is pretty fun as well.

I also enjoy various space sims, but Star Citizen has captured my heart and I don't think I could ever play a different space sim without thinking about Star Citizen.