About

Hi, I'm Dominick Allen. At the time of writing this, I'm a senior in Aerospace Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. Before coming to college, I was a nuclear qualified Machinist's Mate in the U.S. Navy. I started learning how to program as a hobby in 2012, when I was still in the Navy. Since then, I've learned much more about programming as part of my curriculum, to make myself more valuable in my future career, and to satisfy my intellectual curiosity.

One of my current projects involves writing an NES emulator in Rust, which you can find on GitHub . I've also written a LISP interpreter using Rust, and I wrote the ground control software for a small lunar lander in my college club, Lunar Lion .

As strange as it might sound, neither Rust, nor C (and especially not C++) is my favorite language. That distinction belongs to Scheme, which is a variant of LISP (you might have noticed that SBCL LISP is in the top 10 fastest languages). I highly recommend learning either Common Lisp or Scheme. Learning Scheme taught me new ways to view problems, and I think it's absolutely fun to program in.

Besides programming, I also enjoy wood working, learning about linguistics, reading, and playing video games. Lately I've been reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and I highly recommend it. I really like old school 2D platformers, Metroidvania games, and various tactical and strategy series, such as XCOM, Fire Emblem, and Civilization.