Who am I?

Wag-wan people?!

My name is Plamen Velkov. I am an aspiring software developer. I am currently in my third and final year at Seneca college. I am enrolled in the Computer Programming and Analysis (CPA) program. This is going to be my blog for the OSD600-NSB course. I live in Canada in the "small" city of Toronto.

First off I would like to welcome you to this blog.

I want to start off by saying I enjoy problem solving and programming in general. I would say that at a very early age I was fascinated by technology and most, if not all, aspects of it. I enjoy learning about how and why something is working and or made. My interests involve a lot of gaming, specifically how games and game engines are made and optimized. With that being said, I have recently found a new passion that occupies my time. I bought an Oculus Quest to introduce me into the virtual reality community. I was blown away by how far VR has come since it's early stages. About 8 months ago I started dabbling in some VR programs and scripting and ever since then it has been a hobby of mine. With openVR becoming a more popular thing, I wanted to take a course which would give me the guidance and prosperity to start getting involved in open source projects such as this discord presence application for the quest. Since the Oculus Quest is a stand-alone Head Mounted Display (HMD) there is no requirement for a gaming PC, thus making discord and other similar applications not know what the user is doing right now. This application allows the user's discord status to be updated over LAN and display their current game and/ or application as the status message.

I picked this repo because it seemed interesting and a step in the direction of truly making the Oculus Quest a stand-alone monster which offers various kinds of functionality besides gaming.

This semester I am hoping to gain understanding of how the open source community thinks and works. The different ways I can contribute to projects, big or small. Most of all I am seeking the confidence I need to contribute something meaningful to the Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) for the Unity game engine. The repo for that can be found here. I want to fully learn how to contribute and use the MRTK because I think it would be neat to have a functional IDE inside a Virtual/Mixed Reality world.

Well, that is enough about me and my plans for the near future (before the world ends).

I hope you liked this blog and stick around, at least until the next one. For future blogs, I am planning on taking you through my process of entering the open source community, and hopefully show you some interesting contributions I make.

Stay safe and take care of each other in these trying times,

Plamen