Biography for Chow Zheng Wei


Briefly about me

I am Chow Zheng Wei, 22 years old, currently doing my final year (4th year) of study with Multimedia University (Malaysia) in B.Eng (Hons) in Electronics.

About my study

I have studied electronic engineering 4 years and I am actually more interested in software instead of hardware because I believed that good software architecture helps in reducing the costs of hardware.

 

My interests

Serial and parallel programming, OOP, algorithm. In short, I am actually more interested in computer science than electronics.


My non-Smalltalk experiences so far

I have intermediate experience in serial & parallel C (Windows Threads, POSIX Threads, OpenMP, and MPI), C++, OOP Java, BASH script, PHP, HTML and a little experience with Javascript as well. In short, I am able to write clean code.

 

My Smalltalk experiences so far

I have around 6 months experience on Squeak Smalltalk. I have been doing research on Google search engine architecture and trying to apply it into Smalltalk search engine. I have done several experiments in Squeak Smalltalk on ranking the searched results in a more relevant way instead of just alphabetical order. Basically I know how to retrieve the whole Smalltalk image and indexed them. Also, I know how to retrieve the senders and implementers of a selector, and the selectors being called within a selector. In short, I am now familiar with Smalltalk.

 

Why am I interested in Smalltalk?

First of all it is because Smalltalk is a pure OOP which I have never learned in my academy, which I find it very interesting and easy to use. Smalltalk is easy to use mainly because Smalltalk has a very good debugger which helps in debugging code efficiently and also understanding the flow of the code. In addition, Smalltalk has explorer and inspector which help developer to observe the value of variables during debugging mode, and allow us to observe a set of data if the code returns a set of data, for instance, an IdentityDictionary. The version control of Smalltalk helps developer to trace back the code he has done. In short, Smalltalk allows developer to develop an idea in an more efficient way. Last but not least, it’s fun!

 

Will I stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished?

Definitely I will stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished. I will keep updating it and fixing the bugs on it. If there is an opportunity, I would like to participate the future GSoC project with Smalltalk.




Updated: 14.4.2012