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Matthew Potter

  • mattpotter562@gmail.com
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-potter-28b9a9272/
  • https://github.com/Mattpott

Welcome

About Me

Hello, my name is Matthew, and I am a 22 year old Computer Science graduate from James Madison University (JMU). I specialize in software development, with a passion for the more systems and algorithms oriented fields of programming. Everything hosted on this website is made by me with the intention of hosting important projects I've worked on as well as being a general location to store anything I believe other people may benefit from. When it comes to education, having new voices explaining topics is very important, I feel.

Aside from programming and learning, I have a love for music, especially Japanese Rock; video games, especially ones which are based on singleplayer skill; and art, especially those made by independent creators. I have a foundational knowledge in Japanese, having taken 4 semesters of it at JMU, and self-studied before and after, but am still slowly working on learning vocab. In the future, I hope to learn more languages, with me already having started learning Korean at JMU, as well as graphical programming as I have a great interest in both. However, I do just enjoy learning about any pretty much any topic in general, and so I will hopefully be hosting lots of pages with a wide variety of topics on this site.

Education

I have attained a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science from JMU, achieving highest honors (Summa Cum Laude) with a 3.95 GPA in the process. I have a strong mathematics background, and spent most of my elective credits learning both Japanese and Korean. Here is a list of some of the classes I feel were most important to my education:

Important Classes
  • Operating Systems [CS450]
    Learned Operating Systems through experience working on a simple OS.
  • Computer Systems I & II [CS261, 361]
    Learned systems-level programming concepts like synchronization primitives, memory management, assembly, and other low-level concepts.
  • Software Engineering [CS345]
    Learned various approaches to delegating work for projects on a team while building a Java application.
  • Programming Languages [CS430]
    Learned about various approaches to programming languages, such as interpreted vs compiled languages, different programming paradigms, and the different constraints on languages for things like memory allocation. (Learned Ruby, Haskell, and Rust)
  • Applied Algorithms & Discrete Structures II [CS412 & CS327]
    Learned various approaches to constructing and analyzing algorithms (e.g. greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, etc.), selection and usage of data structures for problem solving and runtime efficiency, as well as concepts in graph theory and automata.
  • Japanese 101-232 [JAPN101, 102, 231, 232]
    Learned the foundational grammatical rules of Japanese up to an intermediate level.
  • Korean 101 & 102 [KOR101, 102]
    Learned the foundational grammatical rules of Korean to a beginner level.

On AI

Everything on this website, including any hosted works and any page content, is written entirely by me. I am personally not a fan of AI generated content, especially when it comes to generated code, as it is often untrustworthy and inconsistent. In the current landscape of programming and content creation, I feel that this is an important concept to address. For me, generative AI is little more than a lightly improved search engine in its current state. As so much of the data online has become AI generated, it has grown increasingly difficult to use simple search engines to find trustworthy and knowledgeable sources for any given topic. AI eases this, especially in code generation, by giving suggestions of packages or common solutions which have recently become submerged in the deluge of AI generated garbage.

In this way, generative AI solves a problem which it created itself. I do still believe that generative AI is growing into a very important tool for those who wish to learn and create, but it requires a lot of responsibility to be used safely and well. Most importantly I believe that, at least currently, having someone knowledgeable committing to creation for others' understanding is infinitely more valuable than any AI which tries to reproduce their words.

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