I am Cooper. I am a programmer. I am a musician. I am a hobbyist.
I was born in Pensacola, Florida to my parents, Dean and Tami, and I am the younger sibling of two with my sister, Savannah.
When I was a youngen, I played a whole lotta Runescape on my single-core Pentium computer loaned down to me. If I remember correctly, the furthest I got was about level 36 as a warrior. Oddly enough, I specialized in cooking… though it seemed nobody appreciated my artisanal breads. Playing that alongside my original Play Station and my friend’s Super Nintendo… you can see where this is going.
Around the same time, my father taught me my first 2 or 3 guitar chords. I wrote about 30 different sounds using that vast toolset. They’re all recorded on a cassette somewhere around here… After some classical training on Contrabass and a few hours learning the ukulele, I recorded my first album of sorts digitally. That’s floating around somewhere on the internet, but I’ll bury it for now. Let’s be real, I was 16 without much of importantance to sing about.
Not having a whole lot of equipment on hand, I did start playing around with electronics, focusing in musical applications: pedals, mini-synths, etc. Most of them broke after a week of use. With the direction of my education, robotics became a focus and I starting going down that path playing with Arduinos, Atom SBCs, and computer vision. It even got me a plane ticket two years in a row to California for science fair. That was cool.
I eventually studied Computer Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. That was going okayish, but due to some unforeseen issues, I ended up dropping out in my 3rd year. In case you feel the need to ask, I don’t plan on going back anytime soon. After that, I was lucky enough to get hitched to my current job at CleverOgre back in my hometown. I handle most of the programming. It’s PHP/WordPress with many other odd tasks thrown in. Quite a few fun web development projects have come across my desk here.
In-between the work hours, I’ve continued to noodle around. My collections of music equipment and retro video games continues to consume my house. My band, Crystal Coast, is grooving. My girlfriend, Samantha, is sweet as can be. My github keeps filling up with new repos. I’ve started to record a few artists around town. Most importantly, I’ve been taking in a lot of information and meeting new people.
Got any questions?