Hi everyone in the steemit community!
I am very excited about the past week and thought I might share the events and wrap them up in my introduceyourself post.
Let my start by talking about my background.
As of now, I have been a chemistry student for almost 2 years in Zurich - Switzerland. There have been ups and downs during my studies and I guess they are going to continue. However, a highlight up until now was the introductory lecture into programming and its applications in chemistry. I tried to teach myself some programming before, but never quiet managed to do it. This lecture then sparked my interest and got me hooked.
That was one year ago and since then, I did not have a lot of time to get deeper into it, since the past two semesters were quiet intense. However, through my lab works, I was able to get familiar with the programming language R and did some basic data processing with it, which was quiet a lot of fun!
In the beginning of this year, I had the idea to try and build my own PC out of used parts from all over the internet using as little money as I could. I was pretty successful and soon had my first self built pc standing there. Through this project I hoped to get a little deeper into the "computer world" which failed as of then, since the PC stood around for approximately 4 months without doing much.
About one and a half weeks ago, in a desperate attempt not to study, which is what I actually should be doing, I started searching the internet for what I could do with my pc. I read up on mining crypto currencies but was a little disappointed when I found out that I would need a fairly new and powerful GPU to do it at least a little profitable. My PC as of then had a GTX 580 in it. A card that is hot, energy hungry and way too loud to be run through the entire day.
I had almost given up on crypto currencies, as I found Gridcon. There were posts telling me that I could use my old GPU and the CPU I had for doing some actual science! Suddenly, it did not matter to me anymore if it was profitable, I just was amazed by the idea. So I set up my PC to run Boinc, installed the Gridcoin wallet on my Macbook and started crunching. In all the euphoria I forgot about how loud and hot my GTX 580 was and lost two nights of sleep trying to ignore the loud humming of its fans and the hot air going through my room.
A few weeks ago, I worked at my university for a few days and got some money out of it. So I decided to upgrade my GPU to a GTX 1060 3GB and was lucky to have a friend hook me up with an i5-7600K to increase the performance of my system by a margin. The pc is now cool, quiet and actually good for some work!
As of now, I am crunching on my pc, an old laptop and sometimes my macbook pro. I plan on using the PC for some of my own work later this year since I can not spare my macbook for an entire day just because I want to do some calculations for fun. Whenever I am not using the pc, it will be crunching for Boinc and earning some Gridcoins.
Reading so much about Gridcoin, Boinc and the entire crypto universe during the past week, I feel like I want to get deeper into it. I was looking for so long for something I could get hooked by and I think with Gridcoin I found something. Honestly, I am completely unfamiliar with how all the programs involved here work since all I did until now was writing my own code for the pure sake of evaluating data. However, getting more involved in the Gridcoin community and reading up on how Gridcoin works, what the developers do, what problems are faced and how all the systems work really excites me and I hope to be able to do that in the near future.
At this point, a huge shout out to the Gridcoin community for their engagement in forums and their willingness to explain the simplest questions several times if they are asked over and over again. Even though I had little direct contact with others from the community during this time, I felt supported all the time through the numerous blog posts and forum answers given by all of you.
So if anyone has a place for me where I could sneak in and, at the beginning, just read up on and follow what is done and how it is done in Gridcoin, I would be very open to it. I hope that I will learn a lot in the upcoming months and maybe even be able to contribute something in the future!