About

Me

Hi there, my name is Luke Gardner, and I am currently a senior at Rock Canyon High School in Highlands Ranch Colorado. Born and raised in San Jose, California, I adore the sports of hockey and soccer, grown up playing both sports competitively and watching games at the Tank for the San Jose Sharks and Avaya Stadium for the San Jose Earthquakes.

As a sort of linear expansion, having lived in the tech-heavy environment of Silicon Valley, I have steadily grown a fascination with everything relating to the inner and outer workings of computers, from the engineering of the hardware to the mathematics comprising the graphics drawn to the screen.

On another hand, I terribly enjoy eating foods, especially Asian and Latino foodstuffs like ramen and mole. I am constantly in pursuit of new foods I may attempt making and eating myself, paella is a great example of this. By extension, I wholly enamor myself with Asian cultures, mostly through their media including tv shows, books, and music; learning about culutre and food is the best way to learn a language, in my opinion.

Speaking of music, I couldn't live without it. Though most interesting is that I never really dove deep into the depths of song until the pandemic in 2020. Through YouTube, like with most things, I rapidly discovered untold wonders of genres and artists. My favorites coming out of this period are classic 90s drum-n-bass, hip-hop from all periods, and whatever other pieces I can get my grimy little hands on. I am currently building up a vinyl collection, albeit slowly, and have intrest into collecting CDs as well.

Research Interests

Anything pertaining to the natural environment, as well as computers, interests me deeply. My intrigue between the two began during my numerous trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a child, learning about the work the aquarium's associated research institute, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, performed in the Monterey Bay.

Individually, most of my interest lies within the scope of computer science and engineering. As mentioned before, being surrounded by the bleeding-edge teach like Google's Waymo and TiVo definitively tipped my squishy little brain onto understanding how it all worked. It's been a long process, and it's far from over, but I feel at home ingesting, processing, the inner components of software like operating systems and video games.

The nature-oriented factor of my interests mostly stems from how computers interact, and gather data from, nature itself. I fell down a rabbit hole of just how much energy infrastructure such as the massive data centers used by Amazon, Facebook, and the like consumes. Plus, the amount of e-waste produced from the products sold to consumers by these companies, most of which has at least some chance of being recyclable, is now having a noticable impact on waste management and resource consumption. As a result, my goal is to reduce the amount of needless consumption by tech, and specifically computer, products.

Hey look, it's me :D