Matthew Blaire
I started to love video games when I was four years old, sitting on my dad's lap watching him play Halo. I discovered the LÖVE2D game framework (Lua) in middle school and watched every YouTube tutorial I could find, which is how I first learned about game loops.
In high school, I took classes at my local community college through the Running Start program. I was able to take an Intro to Programming in C# class, then I used Unity to build a clone of the VR game Space Pirate Trainer. When I graduated high school, I was accepted to Washington State University where I began my Computer Science degree.
I took Program Design & Development, where I learned about operators, arrays, pointers, strings, recursion, and dynamic data structures like linked lists, all in C. This class was also my first experience with writing pseudocode and working with a group of people. Next, I took a class called Data Structures and Algorithms where we used C++ to learn about memory allocation, pointers and sort/search algorithms. After that school year I had to take a break from WSU for personal reasons.
I went back to the community college in my hometown to continue my education, but in 2020 my entire family moved to Arizona and I followed. In Arizona, I completed a back-end developer bootcamp at Promineo Tech. While it equipped me with valuable skills in Java, Spring Boot, and REST APIs, I realized that web development wasn't the right fit for me.
More recently, I've been using Udemy courses to brush up on my C++ skills and learn to use Unreal Engine. I'm absolutely loving it so far.
