About me

My name is Adam McDaniel. I'm a red-headed musician, programmer, and PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I'm a Knoxville native — born and raised! I love mexican food, tea, the Beatles, and my favorite color is

Me🧑‍🦰

Education

I started college at the University of Tennessee in fall of 2020, and graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in December of 2022. I also finished up my Master’s degree in May of 2024. Currently I’m a graduate student pursuing a PhD.

Programming

Python was my first programming language, but I’m a Rustacean🦀 at heart.

I started programming in middle school during the 7th grade. At first, I was fascinated with making games. I wrote some terrible ones using Pygame. Some of them used sockets to implement multiplayer functionality as well. In high school I joined the FIRST robotics competition team my freshman year, and continued through my senior year. We used Python to write our robot code. During my sophomore year, I became enthralled with the concept of different programming paradigms and programming language design. During my junior year, I implemented a functional programming language named Maroon. I also wrote several other toy languages at the time, including Tsar which is a dynamically typed, ahead of time compiled language which could transpile to both Rust and Go backends.

My best projects by far are Dune and Sage, a shell and a compiler respectively.

Music

I’ve played guitar since 2016, and I play often. I love the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, the Temptations, and Aphrodite’s Child. Anything somewhat bluesy or psychedelic is right up my alley. In particular, 666 by Aphrodite’s Child has likely been my favorite album throughout the past year.

In my free time, you’ll often find me playing guitar, especially when I should be doing something else. I’ve played and sang for several venues and audiences in the past, but I mainly play to entertain myself. Click here to listen to more of my music endeavors!

Linguistics

I’m fluent enough in Spanish to enjoy books, shows, podcasts, and movies in the language. I try to practice at least an hour a day listening to Spanish content in some form or another. I hope to learn more languages in the future, but my stamina for Googling every word I don’t know is growing thin!

I’m very interested in how languages are related to one another: it’s fascinating to me how languages evolve. I’m also interested in constructed languages, like Toki Pona. It’s fun to assign spoken languages to different programming languages as well: Java is certainly Vulgar Latin, JavaScript is English, x86 is a Pidgin, and C is Classical Latin.

Chess

My lichess account is adamthekiwi. I like to say that my peak blitz chess rating was 2161 (quite literally a chess master rating), but it was out of sheer luck that three ~2000 rated players in a row resigned early when I first started.

I also wrote my own cross platform engine which runs anywhere. You can play against it right here in the browser!