Zach Minster

In the fall of 2008, the outset of my junior year of high school, I enrolled in Object Oriented Programming and Systems Design at Ursinus College, a course for junior undergraduate computer science majors designed to emulate real-world software engineering through intensive group projects. There I discovered the greatest software engineering challenge: interacting with clients. I am most proud of mastering the ability to work with customers on a tight time and resource budget. I set up after-school conferences with directors of the Ursinus Career Services department, judging their requirements and implementing software to match. With two other college students, I designed an online system to collect and manage internship experience surveys which students could use to locate suitable internships. We met all requirements and the Career Services personnel expressed tremendous gratitude.

Due to the restrictions of a confidentiality agreement, I am unable to post a thumbnail, source code, or any other representation of this project.

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I conceptualized Keluko in freshman year, and since then I have spent much time chipping away at different pieces of this large-scale multiplayer economy simulator. Independently coding Keluko has taught me about database management, procedural and object-oriented server scripting, and user interface design. From the website:

Imagine. Taking life as you know it and letting go. Forget your job. Forget school. Complete and total immersion in a parallel universe, living the life you've always wanted.

Salivating yet? Keluko is destined to be an online masterpiece of epic proportion. On the surface, Keluko is a revolutionary economy simulator. And yet, beneath its deceptively simplistic face, it is a breathing, pulsating community of diverse personalities all pursuing the same goal - complete capitalistic domination. Fill out a form and start over (for free, of course): Seek a job from your peers; invest in those (community-operated) companies performing best; jump up that corporate ladder; experience the exhilaration of being number one.

Virtual supremacy will be yours for the taking.

Visit Project Homepage

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This challenging console-based Hangman game is perfect for those times when you just can't seem to find anything to do. An assignment for my CS174 course, this program incorporates what I believe to be one of the most challenging Hangman word list ever conceived - guaranteed to baffle your friends!

IMPORTANT: Right click on this link, select "Save As...," and save it as words.txt: Word List File. When the program asks for a word list file, direct it to said file (if you put it in the same directory as the program, just type in "words.txt") and the program will work swimmingly.

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I consider this program one of my greatest accomplishments. Watch as the "robot" solves any maze you could imagine! I encourage you to take a look at the source code - the action seems simple yet belies the complexity just below the surface.

This program is a solution to an Association for Computing Machinery contest problem.

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Import a contact list text file and GO! This is one application that I use frequently. It manages contacts with their first and last name, phone number, address information, email information, and personal website information. It updates, searches, adds, deletes, and lists contacts on the fly, all in a convenient console-based interface.

IMPORTANT: Right click on this link, select "Save As...," and save it as ContactList.txt: Contact List File. When the program asks for a contact file, direct it to said file (if you put it in the same directory as the program, just type in "ContactList.txt") and the program will work swimmingly.

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This humble little app takes binary numbers and converts them to their decimal equivalents using a recursive algorithm. It's a handy tool to use while working with binary numbers!