Hi, I'm jxu. I'm just another person who got his start programming TI-BASIC on my calculator while bored in middle school. It's been a decade since then and I am now pursuing graduate education in statistics, but I still have an interest in low-level programming and in particular assembly.
I have known about this site for a long time, way back when Blockdude and other games were all the rage in school. I think what motivated me to post was watching The 8-Bit Guy's videos starting a few years ago and noticing the ubiquity of BASIC on old computers. Retro Game Mechanics Explained also gets a big shoutout for reigniting my imagination. I imagine some of the best programmers in the world got their start writing BASIC on an 8-bit machine like the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, and it's funny in a way that I got my start from similar humble beginnings. I don't have any of those machines, but I do have a TI-84 SE and TI-89 Titanium which I am very fond of. Tbh I don't know where they are currently as I haven't used them since high school as none of my college math classes ever required a calculator.
I have not written that much BASIC or assembly actually. I learned BASIC from my TI-84's calculator manual and the most substantial program I have written is a tiny text adventure that is 800ish bytes and a bunch of if statements. My assembly experience is a small amount of x86 and MIPS code golfing. Despite this, it's always been a dream of mine to one day commit to making a great game or program entirely in assembly. It would be cool to do it for my calculator, but I don't know if there is good documentation on all the hardware functions. When I checked a few years ago the situation seemed bleak.
Other than programming I have an interest in some lego stuff and also minecraft, which seems to be a common theme around here. I've been part of a redstone server called ORE (formerly RDF) for about 8 years and I occasionally made interesting builds, which you can find on my youtube (this maze gen probably the most interesting thing I've made
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBSenG_1BXQ). When the semester is over I may get back into it, maybe.