About Me
Hello! My name is Nicholas Stam. I am currently a 3rd year student at Hope College in my home town of Holland Michigan, where I am studying computer science. I taught myself to code at a very young age and created this website as a place to showcase various personal projects. My other hobbies include filmmaking and wildlife photography, some of which can be found on my Instagram.
My Computer Science Journey: I first became interested in computer programming in second grade, when my brother attended a youth science camp at Hope College about video game development. Although I wanted to go, I didn't meet the minimum age requirement for this camp at the time. After the camp ended, my brother introduced me to GameMaker 8 and I immediately became fascinated by the simple act of making objects on the screen move around. Admittedly at this time, I was using drag-and-drop, so my Dad introduced me to Python which became my first coding language. Some of my first scripts included a chatbot that disregarded all input and was just mean to the user, followed by a more advanced deck of cards program that would draw cards in ASCII art and play the world's simplest card game (War) against the user. In third grade, I was finally old enough to attend the video-game summer camp, where I put together a simple game where you played as a burglar stealing coins and gems from various levels while trying to avoid cops that moved around the room (it was a blatant knockoff of a mobile game I had on my phone). For the next several years, making various low quality games became my favorite passtime. I estimate that I produced between 50 and 100 of these games although very few of them I deemed worthy to publish in any form. I slowly began incorporating GameMaker Language code (which is somewhat similar to JavaScript) in place of drag-and-drop elements while following internet tutorials, and eventually abandoned drag-and-drop all together. To this day, GML is still my all-time favorite coding language, but I now have some considerable degree of experience with C, C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, GLSL, Perl, Racket, Python, HTML and CSS, Fortran, and x86 Assembly. My most proficient languages are C, Python, and Java.