About

My name is Artan Ismaili. I am a senior at Brigham Young University pursuing my BS in Computer Science and BS in Information Systems. Generally, I like school. Sometimes, I feel burned out and just want it to be done. However, I consider myself extremely blessed and lucky with the opportunity I have had to attend college in the United States. Unlike most of my high school friends back in Kosovo, I was able to get an education with the help of so many people here in the States and my family, who have helped me both financially and morally throughout my endeavours in this country. I am forever grateful for their love and support, and my achievements are a direct result of their generosity and care for me.

My classes have been really fun, and generally speaking, I am very excited about most of them. I like programming, so Computer Science classes and my ISYS tech classes are my favorites, although I enjoyed economics, math, and physics a lot too. I have used a variety of programming languages and technologies for my programming projects, such as Java, C++, Delphi Pascal, PHP, Scheme, Ruby, Rails, and C. I run Windows XP professional and Fedora Core 10 in my box. I am not strongly opionionated on one vs the other, but I am starting to enjoy linux a lot more, now that I understand it better.

My main interests in Computer Science are software development and design, and latetly have been very interested in security and distributed systems. In my security class, I got to implement different encryption algorithms such as AES, different Block Cipher Modes encryptions, RSA, Linux password cracking, buffer overflow attacks etc.I also enjoy design issues and applying patterns to problems. My large scale distributed systems design class has been even more helpful in realizing the need for loosly coupled systems and good design in general.

Also, this semester I implemented a web server in C++. I is a fully functioning web server capable of serving static and dynamic pages via CGIs in perl, python, ruby, php and many other languages. It does not currently do caching, but that is something I would like to work on. Why would I program my own web server as opposed to using Apache, GlassFish or some other open source server? Well, I had to do it for a project in my internet programming class, but the experience on building it and understanding web servers as well as performing controlled performance tests, has been invaluable.

Besides building software, I am an avid accordion and guitar player, although I haven’t played much guitar for the past several years. I also like watching movies and lately having lived in Utah I finally fell to the temptation of going skiing. I am HOOKED now. I regret that for my 5 years of living in Utah I have only gone this winter for the first time, and now I am about to move out of state due to graduation. I will miss skiing a great deal.