An introduction

Despite my involvement with the project for several years, I do not believe I have ever actually introduced myself. While the developers and a few other members of the community know about me, in general the rest of the community knows me as the guy that writes the newsletters and sometimes posts snarky comments on the forum whenever I see something that I think is a bad idea. As such, this might be a good time to introduce myself and provide some background.

My name is Ziliang Guo and I am currently pursing a masters of science in computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after having completed a bachelors of science in computer science while also picking up a minor in East Asian Studies just for fun. I know Chinese, Japanese, and a smattering of French that I still retain from high school and am also a blue belt in taekwondo. My interests lean more towards computer architecture and high performance computing and less so on the math heavy theories of computer science, as I generally find those topics either tedious or over my head so I leave that to more interested people to deal with. Currently however I am on an internship at a company working on their implementation of UEFI, the experiences of which I will likely write about in the future as examples of how messy lower level systems development can get. I joined the ReactOS project in my freshman year of college as a release engineer and started writing the newsletters after that as a way of learning more about Windows development. My area of responsibility grew as I became the lead moderator on the forum, then website content manager, and a public relations coordinator, though the project is sufficiently small and the team mebers of sufficient initiative that I am generally only needed for advice and perhaps some proofreading for PR matters. Since then, I've generally avoided working on ReactOS code itself due to the sprawling complexity, though the knowledge I picked up was applied in other work I've done.

Now, as for this blog itself, it is intended to serve as a platform for developers and other members of the ReactOS team to talk about their work and experience in a less formal setting than a news letter. The project has always attracted a rather diverse set of personalities with varying backgrounds, though few ever shared their experiences with the broader community. That community tends to be somewhat insatiable when it comes to news from the project, something which cannot be satisfied by one person. Members of the team also often have interesting experiences that are not directly related to the project that the community would likely find interesting but which would be out of place in a newsletter. It is hoped that with this blog, developers can drop in and share their thoughts without having to be badgered when a newsletter is being drafted. So stay a while and listen and perhaps you too will learn something new or interesting.