Hi there, I'm Maxim Zabilo and am a programmer!

I am a San Jose local, as I have grown up here for most of my life. Undoubtedly, one of my favorite places is the Municipal Rose Garden. For my education, I went to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and graduated with a Bacehlor's in Computer Science this year! As such, I am looking for a job (ex: entry level) that would give me experience in the field. Ultimately, I would like to work on things related to computer graphics like Augmented or Virtual Reality. I am dedicated to learning anything new that I need to know like I was when making this site. Look at you in shock... Given how great my website layout CLEARLY IS you never would've even guessed that this page wasn't made using Wix or Squarespace ;)

In my free time I enjoy longboarding, preferably on newly paved cement as the feeling of pushing off once and traveling so far is just sublime. I wish I could skateboard in nature, unfortunately backpacking through only one of the most beautiful trails in the US, the John Muir Trail will have to do. I'm planning to hike through it sometime before the end of this year.

One field in particular that I like is computer graphics. A game I would like to thank for that is Minecraft. When I was younger, I was hesitant to play it at first because of its "poor graphics", especially since I was playing games like Labyrinth 3D, Angry Birds, and Cut The Rope on my tablet. All of which looked so much better to my eye than Minecraft. I ended up playing Minecraft anyway only to find myself enjoying exploring the blocky surroundings and mining diamonds despite my previous opinions. Perhaps, I still wasn't completely fond of the visual aspects of Minecraft as I ended up downloading a mod called Optifine.

Optifine transformed the Minecraft experience by changing seemingly little things like making the grass flow in the wind, or changing how light diffused into the surroundings, but this made the world feel so much more alive. It made me wonder how good can graphics get which is when I learned about raytracing. At the time it wasn't available for Minecraft, but in 2020 the dream finally came true. Raytracing is fantastical, while the idea for it may have originated centuries ago today we are finally able to see it in work in realtime as our hardware caught up to our ambitions. Saying Minecraft looks like a different game with raytracing would be an understatement, it's a whole other world!

Unreal Engine 5 is another crazy impressive piece of technology. Its dynamic lighting model can handle billions of triangles in a scene and render it all in realtime! If interested, I suggest searching up the demo for the engine itself. I worked on a raytracer myself, rendering scenes only thousands or a few tens of thousands of triangles in non-realtime making the realtime results of Unreal Engine 5 that much more impressive for myself. In the future, I plan to work on projects of such magnitudes.

I know the answer to which came first the chicken or the egg so don't hesitate to ask!