“We basically talk about coding a lot. Coding and memes,” Edgar Lin (12) said of his friend Patrick Zhong (12). “Most of our interactions are him and Adriano [Hernandez (12)] trying to indoctrinate me into liking memes.”

And because words like “memeable” have made their way into his vernacular, Edgar considers Patrick and Adriano’s “indoctrination” at least a partial success. Patrick finds humor in these viral posts, including one recent one that observed that “Jesus,” pronounced backward, sounds like “sausage.”

“It is not really fun to be around someone who does not understand your jokes,” Patrick said. “When you are being serious without fun in life, it is okay for professional settings, but when you are with your friends, having a good time, laughing, that is how you are close with someone.”

Edgar offered another anecdote of Patrick: when he decided to bike to school for a week.

“I remember running into him on my way biking to school once, where he was also biking,” Edgar said. “That was interesting. He had gotten up way early because he did not know how long it would take for him to bike to school, so I guess I could probably say something about that — about his engineer’s mind calculating margin of error for physical travel times. That’s probably why he does CS.”

Patrick concurs: Computer science, he says, is preferable to engineering due to its abstraction.

“For engineering, you need materials and it is kind of annoying to have to get all of that, but in programming, with an idea, you can coding something up and make something that is your idea and create something out of scratch basically,” Patrick said.

For his first time coding, Patrick set his sights on creating his own game.

“I started learning by myself and I mainly learned outside of class. It was just a standard platformer — it is potatoes shooting tomatoes,” he said. “It just evolved as I made it, so I did not start off with anything in particular, just wanted to make a platformer.”

He gained most of his knowledge through trial and error, eventually self-studying Java to challenge test into AP Computer Science.

“At first, I did not know how to do anything, so when I did not know how to do something, I would just search it up and learn while doing it,” he said.

Edgar mentioned Patrick’s pragmatic attitude towards programming.

“I remember we were working on a game together,” Edgar said. “Adriano and I kept arguing about best programming practices and so on and so on for everything, and Patrick just went ahead and coded most of it up.”

Given Patrick’s experiences with computer science and memes, it’d be difficult to guess his third major interest: ballet.

“I joined this ballet dance academy — it is a Russian one — in sixth grade because my mom wanted me to stand up straighter,” he said. “My first memory of doing ballet was the teacher having her hand above my head and I had to jump and touch it. I enjoy expressing myself, but mainly, I like the performances because it is very thrilling being on stage. I kept going, and it’s been seven years.”

Dancing gives him a chance to express himself, with the added adrenaline rush of performing in front of a live audience.

“[I like] taking on someone else’s persona,” he said. “We enact fairytales — well, darker — and I’m a character in story, so I’m becoming someone else.”

Ballet, like computer science, is an area of continuous improvement for Patrick.

“Getting better was a motivator and as I progressed, I got better,” he said. “If you do not get better and you are the same after one year, it is not really fun anymore, so I kept learning.”

Additional reporting by Humans of Harker Managing Editor Melissa Kwan.