Karam Assany's Personal Blog

About

I’m Karam (pronounced: kuh-rum), a self-taught computer programmer, an amateur philosopher and a wannabe mathematician. I love consistency and despise ambiguity. I believe that creativity and consistency are not necessarily opposites.

Hobbies

My main “practical” hobby is programming, which includes: building infrastructure software (like libraries and frameworks, but mostly helper tools and scripts), developing text games and contributing to free software projects.

Hacking is a better word to describe most of my programming activity. I always strive to be a real computer user; to have the ability to exactly tailor the computer to my own specific needs.

I also play video games. I’m especially interested in retro-gaming: Atari 2600, NES, SNES, GameBoy, old MS Windows games, low-quality flash games (SWF), Java ME games (J2ME), DOS games etc.

My favorite games include:

Mathematics

I believe that mathematics is a coin that has two faces: one is discovered (the inherent logical conclusions) while the other is invented (notation, terminology, etc). Doing mathematics is like discovering the divine backend of existence and inventing media to describe the results of that discovery.

My personal relationship with mathematics is weird; I love it but I’m not always in the mood of exploring it. Because mathematics is deeply interrelated to academia (due to unfortunate historical reasons), I find the current discourse to mathematics so dull and even elitist. I find more joy in rediscovering mathematics that is well-known millennia ago than reading a dull soulless academic textbook.

But don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the work of everyone that contributed to the current knowledge base of mathematics, but let’s say I don’t generally find the media through which this knowledge is distributed to be appealing.

Reading

Text is my favorite channel of information transfer. For the majority of things that I learned on my own; I used text almost exclusively.

I dislike books, though. I rarely have the motivation to read an entire book from cover to cover. Fiction, novels and autobiographies are not my thing; I’d rather waste my time reading the man-page of git than reading a novel about whatever. I believe fictional stories and autobiographies are better presented (and enjoyable) as pictures (e.g. movie, TV series or even comics).

Many people get confused when I say that I like reading but I don’t like books; mostly because these people’s experience with reading is so shallow. Blogs, wikis and websites in general provide information in a more compressed, organized, filler-free and interlinked format. On the other hand, books tend to be repetitive, slow-paced and full of fillers; they organize information in a linear way (just like a video tape).

My favorite website is the English Wikipedia, which I believe is the most important body of text that a human collective has ever written.

Subjects I’m interested in

Education

I am mostly self-taught. I wasted 12 years of my childhood going to primary and secondary schools before I realized the fact that the things I actually learnt from school could’ve been summarized in two years total. I dropped out of college at 2021, effectively aborting my formal educational “journey”.

I taught myself programming (with a small amount of help from my father) since I was 10, but it was mostly playing around as I didn’t have stable access to the Internet. I started learning serious programming when I was 17, and started making money of it2 when I was 21.

Career

Refer to my resume (PDF format).

  1. I am fully aware that two of my favorite games are made (or to be more precise, bought) by Microsoft. ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. I didn’t plan to have a programming-related career, but my choices are limited. ↩︎