About

Portrait

My name is Raphael Emberger and I’m studying computer science at the Zurich University for Applied Sciences (ZHAW).

I got into programming by 2012 when I started to build Excel workbooks thanks to a minor event at school or at work which I actually can’t recall anymore. It didn’t take long for me to heavily struggle with the basic Excel functions which lead to learning about the possibility of using VBA in Excel. You can probably imagine how that happened: Googling for a solution to a problem and you find a completely new way of solving it - in my case that was VBA. So I had lots of fun with it for a couple of months before I wanted more. So I grabbed myself Visual Studio 2012 and started learning VB.NET in the fall ‘12.

Then a 2 year period followed where I expanded my knowledge and programmed many different applications. Here are some examples:

  • a 3D-spline renderer
  • a calculation library for more complex mathematics
  • Excel addins to convert tables to ASCII or to crack any restriction on an Excel file
  • a wrapper to convert richtext files to standard pages via LaTeX(Oh yeah, somewhere along the way I picked up LaTeX too - because it’s awesome)
  • a tool to do maths with chemicals
  • an internet disconnector to forcefully focus on work
  • a multithreaded downloader class
  • a tool to change file timestamps
  • a tool to stream and download movies
  • a tool to draw distance considering crosshairs for a shooter game
  • a linear algebra calculator
  • a class for modeling websites
  • a YouTube downloader (if interested, check out my recent follow up)
  • a tool to list newest songs from beatport and searching them on YouTube
  • a wrapper for Xbox controllers
  • a tool to calculate k values of the “everything formula”
  • a drifting mod for GTA V
  • a Runge-Kutta library
  • and many, many more…

Some of those projects were never completed, but most of them worked back then.

So I enrolled into ZHAW in ‘14 and studied mechanical engineering because I used to be a constructer. Since then I didn’t have much time for programming. Fortunately I realized one year and a bit later, that I wasn’t content with what I was majoring in and decided that computer science was the way to go. However, I was a bit too late for switching right away to CS and therefore I didn’t drop out immediately - instead I only attended courses I could transfer to my future cs studies: Analysis, numerics and such.

And here I am, studying computer science. And I love it(not everything of course, but in general I do).

Raphael Emberger, Säntisstrasse 13c, 8305 Dietlikon, Switzerland