Project Description

A brief yet triumphant introduction

Published: July 26, 2013

Hello there! Welcome to my blog! My name is Danny! Some people call me Danno. A select few call me Iceman. But most call me Danny!

This blog is inhabited by strange and wonderful creatures called posts! For some people, posts are pets. Others use them for fights. Myself… well, you’ll see soon enough how I treat my posts.

First, what is your name?

I kid. If you’re on the inside of that reference, then you, like me, must be a product of the 90s and must have had a loving relationship with a Gameboy.

Lame introduction aside, this post actually has very little to do with the 90s.

Rather than talk about the decade that gifted us with The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Twin Peaks, Beanie Babies, Tamagotchi, and Pokemon Trading Cards, among so many other wonderful and bewildering things, I’m going to share the fruits of some recent introspection and answer a few questions that have been floating around my brain recently.

Who am I?

Obviously I know who I am. The question I really want to answer is “What’s a brief and effective way I can introduce myself to strangers on the internet?”

As I said at the top of this post (in the middle of my funny funny Pokemon reference), my name is Danny and I am 22 years old.

2 months ago, I graduated from the University of Nebraska Omaha with a degree in computer science. In August, I’ll be moving more than 1200 miles from my home in Omaha, Nebraska to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania where I plan to earn my Master’s degree in Computer Graphics and Game Technology (CGGT).

I’ve decided to move halfway across the country, uprooting everything I’ve ever known in the process, because more than anything else (at least currently), I want to work on animated feature films and visual effects. The CGGT program at Penn was created specifically to prepare students for technical careers that require interdisciplinary skills, such as those found in computer animation. This program feels tailor-made for me and my interests, and I can’t pass up what seems like the beginning of a path that could lead me to a job I’ve been dreaming about since I was 17.

Additionally, the graphics projects that have been completed by former and current Penn Engineering students blow my mind. Watch this video by former student Yining Karl Li, these videos by current Ph.D. candidate Tiantian Liu, and this awesome video of selected technical works by graphics students to see some of the things that have impressed me the most. It’s encouraging to think that when I graduate from Penn in December of 2014, I could have an equally impressive body of work to my name. In fact, it is my absolute highest priority to create a body of work that rivals anything else that has come out of the CGGT program. I know I can compete.

Why am I blogging?

I’ve decided to start blogging for a lot of reasons.

One. Writing about me and the things that happen in my life forces me to slow down, step back, and regularly dedicate at least a little bit of time to personal reflection. It’s difficult to influence your future without first understanding where you are and where you’re coming from, right?

Two. Occasionally on this blog, I will be writing technical things, such as tutorials and breakdowns of my projects. Technical writing that is entertaining and simple but also complete is difficult and a skill that requires a lot of practice. I hope regularly updating this blog will improve my communication skills, specifically those related to technical writing. Also, on writing tutorials, I think one of the best ways to learn and understand something is to teach that something to someone who knows less about it than you do. There’s no lower denominator than “The Internet”, so I have my work cut out for me.

Three. For many, much of the information that exists about them online was put there with no intention of sharing it with a wide audience. At the time of this blog post, a Google search of my name returns the meetup.com groups I’m a member of, a few Google Groups discussions I’ve taken part in, a Pledge Music campaign I contributed to three years ago, a partial graph I made on creatley.com, and a repost of a Twine story I wrote last summer. I’m not embarrassed by this information, and it isn’t incriminating in any way, but it definitely isn’t the way I want to be remembered.

I want to leave a very deliberate and easily followed digital trail about my life–an honest account of who I think I am. In fact, there are a lot of days when I wish my parents and grandparents grew up in a time that allowed them to keep personal blogs. It would be fascinating to relive their lives through the content they posted–those things they felt needed to be shared as they made their ways in this world. I’m blogging because someday I hope to have people in my life that want to know where I came from.

Four. Like most, I’d like to accomplish extraordinary things during my lifetime. I want to be an example of a mostly regular person who learns hard things, and uses his learned knowledge to build cool things. Admittedly, “regular” might not be an apt word to describe my life situation–I was raised by stellar parents in a loving family in a safe and supportive environment. I’m not oblivious to the fact that I’ve had more opportunities than most. I’m still a believer in hard work though, and hard work definitely played a part in getting me to this point in my life. I hope that by highlighting my accomplishments as well as my failures and disappointments along the way, I can show that besides hard work, there’s nothing particularly special about the people who pursue and eventually land their dream jobs.

Why did I make a website?

It seems like everyone working in computer graphics has a demo reel. If they don’t, they probably should. By the time I graduate Penn, I should have a demo reel to call my own, and this website is my place to showcase it.

Also, it’s badass to tell people they can email me at my personal domain–me(at)DannyRerucha(dot)com.

That’s it. That’s me. That’s what I’m doing here.

Cheers.

P.S. Please don’t call me Iceman. That nickname died in high school, and the story about how I got it isn’t even a cool one.

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Image credit: Desi Mendoza