About Me

Who I Am

My name is John Brian Morillo, a Computer Engineer. I am from Dominican Republic and came to the United States when I was about 10 years old. I can speak English and Spanish; still, I'm working towards expanding my language skills by learning Japanese! It's really fun so far. I'm usually a man of few words & like to get to the point of things. Also, I do believe that honesty is the best policy! I'm a very self-motivated individual and I like to dive into things that are interesting or fun to me. These things vary from whole new languages to programming languages, algorithms, and recently the RISC-V ISA! The things that tend to interest me the most are also things that can help me with my career which is really nice. 

Since as far back as I can remember, I have always liked videogames and by extension, electronics. I remember spending lots of time playing Pinball 3D Space Cadet when I was younger, and then getting a Gameboy and playing lots of Pokémon, Sonic, Mario, Dragon Ball, and many of the classics that we know and love. At one point, the Gameboy died, and I decided to open it up and see what was wrong. Turns out it was the battery, but I couldn't get that fixed at the time. 😢 That was my first hardware experiment, and my curiosity grew once I got to the US. In middle school, I got really into computers and phones, watching YouTube videos from channels like Linus Tech Tips, JayzTwoCents, MKBHD, and others. Seeing all the new stuff in the computer and electronics world was always super interesting, and I soon became the friends & family tech support for everything from phones, computer software stuff, and computer hardware stuff. 😅

In high school, I was able to get into the STEM school of my school district. Since I thought games and electronics were cool, I decided to do coding! There I learned some basics of Java, HTML, and CSS. I found software really interesting too, but I also liked to mess around with hardware. Thankfully, Computer Engineering was the perfect blend of Computer Science coding stuff and Electrical Engineering hardware stuff and I decided that's what I wanted to do!

I went to The Pennsylvania State University and started the first two years at a branch campus before going to main campus in State College, PA. The first year was great, math was a lot of fun. Second year was the COVID year, which was a little difficult, but it had to be done. The last two years at main campus were also fine, but getting the hang of being away from home and having to do everything myself took a little while. The core classes for my degree were also incredibly interesting and fun so by the end I was glad to have chosen the Computer Engineering degree! This also allowed me to meet a lot of cool people that have become close friends and helped me grow my professional skillset. 

I also like memes! Field-topical memes are very entertaining once you get it!

Hobbies

Other than reading & learning, I like to play video games and listen to a wide variety of music. Rhythm games like Rockband, DJMAX, and especially the Hatsune Miku ones have always been fun for me. Mobile ones like Cytus are fun too but I haven't been playing those as of late. Those many rhythm games have introduced me to a ton of different styles of music and I'm grateful for it, I'd recommend trying one! Recently, I've been getting into fighting games like Guilty Gear STRIVE and Street Fighter 6 mainly because I played Super Smash Bros. a lot but I realized I didn't have much traditional fighting game experience and they looked like fun. Also, my friends got me into League of Legends when I first started university and that has been pretty fun overall too (Aphelios anyone?). There are many other kinds of games that I enjoy from PlayStation to Nintendo games, single-player or multiplayer. Not much of an Xbox fan here since most of the games come to PC anyway (Thanks Microsoft!). 

I spend a lot of time on my computer as well. For the most part, that time is spent coding, playing games, and/or talking to friends on Discord. It's a custom build and has been with me since 2017. It's a little dated but still works fine, it was top of the line when I bought it, so I figured I don't have a reason to upgrade just yet. NVIDIA is making that hard anyways with the GPU prices of the 4000 series. AMD is a little better but again, I don't have much reason to upgrade, and I think NVIDIA drivers are a little more stable. On the side is a pic of the system along with some specs if you were curious!

I still watch informative/educative videos on more kinds of things all thanks to channels like Veritasium, Low Level Learning, SmarterEveryDay, fasterthanlime, and others. Learning about how things work, why they are the way they are, physics, and coding is always really interesting! I would recommend checking out any of these channels if you are interested in learning. They're all informative and still entertaining so it's not like watching a boring PowerPoint presentation.  I don't really watch shows on TV, Netflix, or any of the other streaming services. I exercise often as well, been focusing on flexibility because I think it's important. 

Another thing I enjoy is anime/manga. Back in the Dominican Republic, I used to watch a lot of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, it was a lot of fun and once I got to the US and figured out what anime was, I started watching many different ones. Naruto is good, Once Piece is very good, Gintama and Kono Suba are very funny, and a lot of other fun stuff. Closer to the end of high school, I started reading manga (the source of anime) and that has become my main consumption medium. I've read a lot of, subjectively, good and bad stuff and that's been fun. Would recommend! 

Picture of my computer Tower! Has many stickers on the side from LTT and others.

Very expensive and overkill back in the day but decent speeds nowadays :')