1. The personal website
Being in the Math Faculty at the University of Waterloo means that I have mixed with quite a number of people studying Computer Science. As long as internship application concerns, people are very concerned about side projects. Seasoned hackathon participants they are, and they always discuss about their passions and ideas.
Inspired by these peers, I started to build one myself, starting with the topic that I can effortlessly talk about at length: mathematics. The subsequent weeks were spent on that just to recall my experiences in the IMO (along with some pictures from the event itself) and to design my trigonometry tutorials. A few more non-mathematical sections were added, but they are to be polished with more descriptions on these activities.
Suffices to say, the making of this webpage took me a colossal amount of effort: in compliance with the syntax of HTML and CSS that were just too complex for a “C++ guy” like me. More often than not, my experimentation on the CSS design template just didn’t work (wrong class, syntax error, conflicting styles, etc). Fortunately, people around me are supportive in helping and giving feedback on this project (thanks to everyone who roasted and helped on my website!).
Among the sea of contemporary music, there are a few songs that I couldn’t help but to replay, replay, and replay. One day, I suddenly thought, “what’s a better way to honour the songs and the artists than playing these pieces on piano?”
The main challenge to this is to identify a suitable accompaniment rhythm and the chord progression of the pieces (I could have looked up the internet to search for the piano sheets, but I prefer playing it my own way 😛 ). This explains why the uploaded songs right now are mostly slow and sentimental: they do not have much percussion component in them, which makes it easier to find a piano accompaniment to match tone and style of the original piece. Adding to the challenge is my tendency to accelerate along with my playing of the pieces, which made it necessary for me to listen to the original music while playing for me to be accustomed to the speed at which I am supposed to play.
Partly because I am far away from most of my families and friends, I had to record the music for them. Months later, a friend suggested, “why not upload to YouTube?” I tried, and found it a viable way for others to learn about my musical passion. 🙂
anzoteh96 