My name is Drew, and this is my online lair. It’s a place for me to experiment with technology, writing, and my newfound hobby – AI.
(This page is a work in progress.)
# whoami
> the beginning
I’m a product of the ’90s. Born in the age of blazing fast dial-up modems and asking my parents’ permission to download a 16MB demo of Age of Empires on the old Macintosh IIsi, computers and technology have been a deep passion of mine for nearly the entirety of my life.
I dabbled in HTML and CSS for middle school projects (and managed to get banned by school I.T. for “hacking”), but in high school I began programming in earnest. My first large project was a multi-game cheat tool code-named Project Input. Written in RealBASIC (now Xojo), it was able to automatically enter cheat codes for any game that supported text input (think a text console, or in the case of GTA3 and the like, a key combo).
My friends and I thought we were going to strike gold with it. We didn’t sell a single copy. Such is the life of a young inexperienced software hobbyist.
> look ma, I got an android!
In 2010, I got my first smartphone, the LG Optimus S. I was fascinated with everything Android could do on such a tiny device, and having had some exposure to Android development in a vocational school, I was hooked instantly.
My first real development project for the Optimus S was the LG Optimus S Control Center, a neat little Windows app that could root the phone, install custom recoveries/kernels/ROMs, and even remove some stock Sprint bloatware. Unfortunately it seems to have been lost to the sands of time, but it was very well-received amongst Optimus S users.
My most well-known project for the Optimus S (though it branched out and supported many other devices) was a custom recovery called Cannibal Open Touch. It was created when myself and another member of the community merged projects that had a similar goal – a custom recovery that cannibalized the best features of other recoveries.