Jazy Llerena

Programming, learning, and playing video games all day, every day

I have always admired the pursuit of knowledge, trying to learn something new everyday. One of my favorite quotes:

“The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.” – Plato

The field of computers have proven to be one where there is much to learn. Not to mention that computers and specifically, technology, is constant evolving and growing, at a rate that is nearly impossible to keep up with in detail. This is why I have always been fascinated by computers and programming.

I built my first computer when I was 12, in a middle school IT program. Upon completion of the program, I was able to keep the computer I had built and learned about, and this became my first computer. I still had dial-up at time. So I would spend countless hours trying to “download the internet” so that my parents could make calls and I could still surf the web. I soon started learning about video games, programming languages, and how servers (Other computers) were the ones that were “serving” me these documents.

— Incoming life story below —

Programming Roots

My first programming experience was in a game called Roblox. This game is still around today, though it is much larger, and robust than what I remember. In this game, every user has their own sandbox world, where they can create anything want using Lego looking blocks and mechanics. What really brought these worlds to live though, was the fact that you could write LUA scripts to manipulate the objects in the world. I was fascinated by this fact, and learned a lot of programming principles through this. By creating simple scripts that would detect if a player touched a block, and in turn it would move a different block elsewhere (Making a door). To creating scripts that would have state, or create interesting world mechanics such as drowning by detecting a player’s position. From here I began to learn several other languages, Java, C++, C#. I would create little projects for fun, just so I could learn the dynamics of the language along with getting a better understanding of different programming concepts.

Afterwards, I began to dive into networking, server management, and web based programming languages. I built a server that I run from my house in Miami. The server runs 24/7 and I have set up scripts so that if it does fail or shutdown, it will reinitialize all of it’s services upon boot up. It is running Linux and I SSH into it to configure, tinker with it (It doesn’t have a monitor connected to it anyways).

I try to do most of my development, regardless of language, on my servers. That way, all of my work is in the “cloud” and backed up to extra hard drives that I have set up. This wordpress installation is currently running on this server in Miami. I also have another server (VPS) that I rent based somewhere in Chicago. Across these two servers, I have all of my personal development projects along with a decent amount of domain names that point to them, each displaying a different page (Such as this wordpress installation).

Miami Dade College

After high school, I decided to go to my local community college, Miami Dade College, to study Computer Science. I also found a job here as a programming tutor.

One of my favorite courses was a Positive Psychology for Personal Effectiveness course. By far, the most useful course I have taken. Another set of courses I loved were some Networking courses. Specifically, a whole year worth of Networking courses. These courses were purely for my enjoyment, since they did not count towards my Computer Science degree. The course was meant to prepare me for the CCNA certification exam. Although, I did pass the course as one of the top students, and won 1st place in Florida in a networking competition, I was just barely unable to pass my CCNA exam. Though, I was not terribly interested in the certification itself, for I simply found the courses and the topics covered in them absolutely fascinating. The courses really enabled me to see the “internet” from a very different perspective, and I intend on using this knowledge to create more efficient, networked applications/games.

During my employment at MDC, I was promoted to Lab Technician, since I was always tinkering with the machines; remotely installing software updates on 300+ machines at a time, or installing new images on all the machines every semester.

University of Florida

After MDC (I had exhausted the maximum number of credits for my AA), I transferred to UF to continue my Bachelors in Computer Science, with an AA and 93 credits in tow. I moved to Gainesville and started attending UF. I love Gainesville, specially compared to the heavy traffic and dense population of Miami. The weather is also cooler in Gainesville. Regardless, I began attending UF and focusing on my studies, with my same mentality of learning something new every day.

Employment at Gleim

After a year and a half or so, I was unable to continue financing my full time student status. So I found employment at Gleim Publications as a web developer. I realized to have a hate/love relationship with web development. I love web development because of my intrinsic love to learn, specifically with how web standards and libraries are constantly changing and being created at a remarkable pace. On the other hand, web development can be a pain, because designing a web page, though it may be a trivial page layout, will not necessarily work on all of the most common web browsers. This means that creating a functional and aesthetic web page is always a challenge, and usually a challenge that can not be foreseen.

At Gleim, I was given a perfect environment to learn about web development, on the front end and the back end, along with web design concepts that may not be seen when creating applications. I also had the chance to refactor old code and create new code using OOP within the PHP backend.

UF Graduation

While working at Gleim, I attempted to continue taking courses towards my Bachelors degree. But Gleim was a very demanding workplace and I couldn’t juggle work and school, not to mention any side projects I may have wanted to work on. So after saving some money, I decided to quit Gleim and attend UF full-time again, in order to finally complete my Bachelors degree in Computer Science.

In May of 2019, I finally graduated from UF with my Bachelors. After a full 7 years, and a total of 171 credits, I completed my “4 year, 120 credit” degree. Of course, being me, I had to go and take a bunch of extra courses that did not count towards my degree. Courses like Advanced Calculus, Modern Physics, Mechanics, Cisco Networking, Psychology, ect. And I would have taken more if I could, I absolutely loved those courses and found them genuinely interesting. I found almost all of the courses I took during my entire academic career very interesting and insightful/helpful in one way or another. I will always fondly remember the 7 years I have spent in school.

The diploma is verifiable at https://student.ufl.edu/cediploma/validation, using the code shown on the diploma (19IM-JH4K-J3AC).

Unofficial Transcripts