A pattering of clicks from typing away at his keyboard fills the atmosphere. Line after line of code, each for its own function, materializes on his laptop screen.

Adriano Hernandez (12) loves to build things, and has dedicated much of his free time to programming. In sixth grade, he started to create games using the programming languages Scratch and Flash.

“I think [computer science] is interesting because you can build things quickly and you can make your ideas manifest themselves in real life much more quickly than you can in other mediums, such as hardware, such as AV engineering,” he said.

Besides his interest in coding, Adriano also has a deep background in music. He has been playing the piano seriously since seventh grade and has been singing in Guys Gig since sophomore year.

Susan Nace, the vocal music teacher, emphasizes Adriano debating with others to widen his knowledge and increase his shrewdness.

“I think he’s the person that’s pretty quiet on the whole,” she said. “[However,] he loves to argue, so my first impression of him was, ‘Dude, why are you always arguing with everybody?’ But that’s the way that he sharpens his wit, and he loves to argue with very, very, very smart people, and he’s very good at it.”

To many people, Adriano appears to be introverted; yet, once he opens up, he effortlessly exhibits wittiness and a dry sense of humor. Adriano’s friend Edgar Lin (12) spoke about his intelligence shining even in everyday conversation.

“When you talk to him, he seems kind of pessimistic and doesn’t really care a lot about intellectualism and so on,” Edgar said. “But if you listen to him, he’s a lot smarter and funnier than you think he is.”

Adriano’s interests in music and creating on a computer correlates to his engagement in electronic music.

“I feel that you have a lot of freedom when you’re making music on a computer, because without needing to have the huge resources you would if you were to make, say, orchestral music with an actual orchestra or whatever, you can build much more variegated things in general more easily and you can build them faster,” he said.

His friend Praveen Batra (12) recalled a memory of Adriano’s musical talent at a birthday party in middle school.

“In the course of 30 minutes to an hour, he basically made an electronic music track,” Praveen said. “You listen to it, and you think, ‘This basically sounds like it’s professionally produced.’ He’s definitely got experience with that.”

Praveen described Adriano’s personality as “nonchalantly intellectual,” someone who may appear noncommittal on the surface but invests himself deeply in whatever piques his curiosity.

“I’ll be chatting him on Facebook, and he’ll just randomly mention some obscure book on economics that he’ve been reading,” Praveen said. “Or he’ll mention how he’s been working with matrices to understand deep learning, machine learning, to build his own things. He’s working on a project for computer science class. When I did that project, I remember I just did the bare minimum through processing wave files; I did one filter. He’s put in like six different filters and he’s still working on it, just to add more stuff way above and beyond the requirement.”

Adriano hopes to make a product out of the integration of his musical and programming skills in the future.

“We built some [synthesizers] for a project for a class before. I built a simple WAV parser that did some stuff that would add filters and whatnot, so I was thinking of expanding that to make a full-fledged synth that I could maybe sell,” he said. “I think it’s fun to try and combine my hobby of music with computer science kind of to build something that I haven’t tried before, and then maybe try and make it a profitable project.”