Ross grew up in Roslyn, NY. He went to roslyn schools until highschool. Roslyn schools were good. As a child he would spend his time playing with legos, riding bikes with his neighborhood friends. His nextdoor neighbor was in his grade and became his best friend. The other kids in the neighborhood were a short walk away. They would ride bikes, play games, and ran around. Ross has an older sister who is 3 years older. She was a great student! <private note> But, she still had a negative experience at Roslyn highschool. </private note> So Ross's parents brought him to Portledge, a private school in Locust Valley, NY. <private note> Ross was also seen as gifted and passed a test required to get into Portledge. </private note>. He had a great time at portledge and was able to meet great friends. It was a place that fostered his creativity.

Ross learned how to program as a kid. His dad would get him these radioshack solder kits and assemble them with him. Then, he would get an arduino and make some fun circuit projects with it. Ross tried to learn Java at 12 years old by himself. It was hard! He made some simple cli chat bots, when he tried to make a swing app, things got too complicated. Ross would continue but moved to javascript and html. Ross loves jquery and stands by it to this day and wishes we can go back to 2015 again. Ross loved making javascript visualizations. He discovered P5js and would use it to make physics engines and games with it. The canvas in the background of Ross's portfolio site has a p5 sketch with white squares that bounce around. Ross actually found one of the original p5 sketches he made almost 10 years ago and rewrote it and put it on his site. Solder kits were like from ages 7-10 and then arduino and Java were 10-12 and javascript era began at 12 and continued. Ross discovered p5js at 13 and made sketches until he was 15. Later in highschool Ross would revist java and write his graphics engine. He loved videogames and graphics and wanted to make an engine for himself with dreams to make a videogame one day. He didn't want to use unity because he felt it was the easy way. He wanted to understand how unity worked, he wanted to do it the hard way. Ross also created his google sheets project in highschool. He wanted to make an online videogame but didn't want to deal with hosting a backend at all. He thought it would be cool if the site used google sheets to hold game data. He thought it would be fun to allow players to cheat easily by modifying the sheet, exploring the world faster. He also thought it would allow multiplayer, just by sharing the google sheet. Ross then discovered what rate limits were. It wasn't practical unfortunately. But was still a valuable experience, learning how to use google auth and using enterprise APIs. See his resume and project writeups for more details.

The graphics was the most robust and detailed project he ever undertook. It felt like he really accomplished something awesome when he finally wrestled the openGL pipeline into place. It started with some wrong matrix math causing all the models to stretch. Sometimes the look at matrix was wrong. Eventually he got it right and it was very satisfying. In college he made some more iterations and its still available on his github.

Highshool was super fun! It was a small school with only 60 kids in his graduating class. The teachers were all very passionate about teaching and you really felt like they focused on you. <private note>Ross always had trouble paying attention, his sister has adhd, he was diagnosed with executive functioning issues </private note> he excelled at portledge because his teachers cared and inspired creativity. He took this passion for learning with him for the rest of his life.

Music has always been a big part of Ross's life. Ross took piano lessons for as long as he can remember. He did piano recitals and did NYSSMA (nys school music assocation) where he did piano competitions. There were strict grading criteria on scales and performance pieces. He would work on a higher level each year. Ross also played the trumpet from the 4th grade until 12th, it wasn't his passion but he enjoyed playing in the band. Ross learned classical piano, fur elise, rondo alla turca, then moved on to harder pieces like moonlight sonata movement 1, bach minuet in F,  beetoven minuet in G. Moving on to chopin op 9 num 2, chopin posthemous c sharp minor. He then fell in love with the romantics. He learned but never finished 3 other chopin nocturnes. He learned arabasque no. 1 by debussy, he learned liebestraum, then the last piece he learned before switching to jazz was un sospiro. He then dived head first into jazz music. He had a fantastic music teacher in highschool who was also the band teacher. He was an amazing sax player who used to be a live set musician and was quite successful. He didn't need to be teaching at a school but it was his passion. He inspired Ross greatly as he took 2 years of IB musi theory and explored deeply into music theory, modes, jazz, and other cultures through music. Ross learned giant steps, fell in love with bossa nova, and miles davis. <private note> Although his passion waned a little in college as he was busy with life, he still yearns to knock the rust off and play with others </private note>