home | Braxton (taxborn) Fair

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name _

Braxton (taxborn) Fair

taxborn is an anagram of my first name, and a username I was able to snag everywhere, so that's why I go by it online.

synopsis _

Hey there! I am a year old software engineer attending Minnesota State University, Mankato majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics. I currently intern at Thomson Reuters as a software engineer currently working on migrating applications to AWS and learning the intricacies of CI/CD.

I've been programming on and off since about 5th grade. At the time I was infatuated with Mario Kart Wii, and after stumbling across videos online of people making custom content / tracks for the game, I was immediately captivated by code and what you could make computers do. While looking at PowerPC assembly code initially scared me off from the idea, I quickly found learning web development to be a comfortable start to programming. Eventually, moving into PHP and Laravel, constructing websites that hook into databases was a huge step that really got me excited, creating websites with functionality showed me there was a big world out there.

After some years self-teaching web development and backends, I moved onto a more general purpose language, Java, as I was really into Minecraft my middle and high school years. I spent some time learning mod development and plugin development for servers, however learning Java opened up a new world of 'real' programming for me and I experimented with game development. However, quickly I realized I don't have the creativity required for indie game development, however this allowed me to be more comfortable exploring other languages, as I dived deeper into the machine in front of me.

As I moved into my college years, I got lower and lower level. I started learning and fell in love with Rust to start learning how to build compilers, and got over my fear of C and even built a small Unicode (UTF-8) parser! My current interest lays in compilers, teaching myself the fundamentals and digging down into assembly (intel x86 only, please). I aim for a career where I can work on tools that help developers ship code, compiler design, or really just wherever my career takes me.

social media / links _

projects _

⋯mauth research project - a machine learning research project in continuous authentication utilizing mouse dynamics
⋯coquito - an experimental programming language to teach me about compilers
⋯u8read - a UTF-8 codepoint parser in C
⋯scf - a student capacity forecaster (scf) made during Winter 2022 for my university to forecast a number of students, courses, and sections to better model how many sections of a course should be open for a major
⋯hyperchessrs - I implemented an interpreter for an esoteric programming language (4D chess) in Rust

research and conferences _

⋯CADSCOM 2022 - I presented my project for a local company, where I integrated a new datasource into their algorithmic trading engine
⋯MNSU Undergraduate Research Symposium 2023 - I presented my machine learning research project for my schools research symposium
⋯CCSC:MW 2023 - again I presented my machine learning research project, this time at a regional conference. My research paper was published in a national peer-reviewed journal and is included in the ACM digital library

copyright _

Created with Astro and deployed with Vercel. Source code available on GitHub.