(As with Aaron Namba’s introduction, this is mostly copied from Vlad Faust’s old community forum)
My name is Ben. I’m 22 years old and working in software development in the United States.
A coworker of mine introduced me to Crystal just a couple months ago, and I’ve been working on projects in Crystal in the office since then. I came to Crystal with no Ruby experience whatsoever, so it’s been very cool to learn a lot of the more Ruby-esque syntax and idioms, though I feel a little behind on some concepts that Ruby programmers would already understand.
I’d like to contribute to useful shards in the future, but at this point I’m still finding my Crystal legs, so it may be a while before I do so. In particular I’d like to do some side projects in Computational Linguistics or Natural Language Processing; I was previously planning on focusing on Python for that kind of thing, but Crystal is at least as slick and is much faster.