Hello!

Welcome! I’m Daryl Zuniga and this blog post is going to tell you a little more about me, my hobbies, and the future of this blog. Let’s begin!

First off, I’d like to give you a little context for where I am in that big journey called “life”. I’m 18 and I just graduated from Cedarcrest High School in the little ol’ town of Duvall, WA. This fall I’ll begin my undergrad studies at Bellevue College and hopefully I’ll graduate from the University of Washington with a degree in Computer Science. I’m currently employed as an intern at Microsoft Research, but I’ll talk more about that later. Now, to the fun part!

Next off, here’s a little about what makes me tick: Running is a real passion of mine. I’ve been participating in my school’s cross-country and track-and-field programs since 5th grade (since about 11 years old). There’s nothing quite like the listening to the calming rhythm of your stride on a dew-covered trail at 7 in the morning . Team sports are another interest of mine. I’m always up for a friendly game of volleyball or ultimate-frisbee at 10 pm. More recently, Acting has become part of my life. This spring, I made my debut in the acting world as Sir Evelyn Oakleigh in “Anything Goes”; a musical production put on by my school’s music and drama departments. As a follow up, I stared in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” put on by a community theater group. And of course, the real passion of my life: Programming. Ever since I first tinkered with ActionScript 1.0 in Macromedia’s Flash 5, I’ve been hooked into programming. I would then continue my programming career with 4 years of programming classes at my high school. This is where my passion truly took off, inspired by my teacher, Michael Miyoshi, and endlessly engaged by the “hello-world” string of my first C++ console application, I knew pretty early that programming was for me. Through out high school, I would learn the basics of object-oriented programming and some of the advanced concepts of C++. In addition to my classes in high school, I took 3 years of Summer Workshops at Digipen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA where I would learn how to program video games. My first professional programming experience came with my first internship with Microsoft in their Office Labs group during the summer of 2008. This internship was very inspirational to me and further cemented my passion for programming. During this internship, I learned the basics of managed languages and the .NET libraries. I also learned about Microsoft’s WPF and Silverlight technologies. Presently (summer 2009), I’m at my second internship with Microsoft. This time, I’m part of Microsoft Research’s Research in Software Engineering group. I can’t give a conclusion of the internship yet (seeing as how it’s not over), but I can say I’m defiantly having a great time. It seems that daily I get to learn something new and it’s defiantly a pleasure to work with some of the brightest computer science researchers in the world. I’m 1 of 4 high school interns at MSR this summer; the majority of interns (there are a couple hundred of them) are PhD candidates.

To conclude, I’d like to share with you a little about my future plans for this blog. I’ll keep this blog updated with new information as my career and education progress. I may also post about random musings I have or anything else that strikes my fancy . This is also my experimental hive for web development and this blog may eventually migrate to a real URL.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to post any comments or questions you may have.