About Me

My name is Brett Semmler, I am a largely self taught software developer. This has been my passion for quite some time; although, it is only recently that I have pursued it in a professional capacity. The point of this blog is to document my own learning and try to share it with anyone who cares to listen. Hopefully others can learn from my own trials and tribulations.

I have spent most of my life as an automotive mechanic that specialized in electrical diagnostic. During the beginning of the pandemic I was laid off, this led me to finally pursue my passion as a software developer. I enrolled in the software development program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT). As of the time of writing this, I am 4 weeks away from graduation (yay!) and ready to start my career.
I initially started programming with Visual BASIC when I was 13. At the age of 14, I purchased my first textbook on C++ and things took off from there. At this point I was largely interested in reverse engineering and began playing around with memory scanners, debuggers, and disassemblers. This led me to developing (admittedly basic) memory hacks for video games.
When I was 15 I entered high school, at my particular school there was a robotics program that I eagerly enrolled in. Later on in high school, my robotics instructor formed a school team for the F.I.R.S.T Robotics competition. Here I was able to play around real time operating systems that ran on NI RIOs and RoboRIOs. During this time, I also developed vision processing to aid in autonomous robot functions. It involved target acquisition and tracking, eventually this led to GPGPU programming using the CUDA API and a Nvidia Jetson TK1. Speed was paramount to the operation of our robots so we could not wait for image processing. In our rookie year our team managed to win the first ever Calgary, AB, competition. We were offered a spot to compete at the worlds in St. Lewis, USA but unfortunately we didn't have the funding to go further.
In the present I love to tinker with, design, fabricate and program various electronic projects. I enjoy manufacturing custom boards for my projects and then subsequently programming them with either C or C++.