Welcome to my website. My name is Daniel McLaughlin and I am a rececnt graduate of Computer Science and LGBT Studies Undergraduate at the Unversity of Maryland. I have recently joined PayPal upon graduating under their Site Reliability Team in Batch Operations. My interests lie in Software Engineering, LGBT Studies, and Writing. In particular, I have a fair amount of experience in C, Java, python , and bash (along with awk, sed, grep). My most exciting project right now is Project #, which is a python program that creates "Roguelike" dungeons based on current Twitter data. I'm working to advance the use of "tweet-seeded random numbers" to produce more interesting maze structures, and am imagining other ways user-created content can be refactored for things beyond advertising metadata.
I also have a great interest in Video Games, and in the vein of LGBT Studies analysing the ways in which Video Game production and consumption create digital identities and cultures, and the challenges they present. I enjoy reimagining the ways games are created and represented, and how they impact the lives of their players. In my free time, I also enjoy to write poetry, and trying to present some of my ideas in blog format.
Thank you for visiting my website. Below are more details about what I've done and who I am. Feel free to contact me about anything you find interesting!
Graduation: May 2016
Why the blog? In my perfect world, every single new and interesting idea that I muse about in my head gets put on paper and worked on. But more likely than not I've noticed these ideas tend to slip away from me. [Currently Unavailable], in a sense, will work to be a culmination of all my interests, and their various intersections. You'll find (eventually) posts about programming and and techonlogies I am currently engaging with, Queer stylings of code and design structures, speculation on Video Games and their encoded systems (programming or otherwise). Every once in a while, you might also find a poem or snippet of fiction as well.
So to answer the above question, the goal of this blog is both to help me keep track of trending ideas and thoughts I wish to explore more, but to also help curious visitors to gain some more insight into topics that really grab my attention outside the resume. This isn't to mean that the blog contains my ONLY interests, but rather the ones I like to explore in my own time.
At this time, the blog is still under construction