User:Curunauth

Hi! I'm a new Wikipedian, and now that I've finally created an account, I'm slowly working though my long list of cleanup / enhancement edits that I've saved as bookmarks over the years. About 80% of the older ones have already been taken care of while I avoided this rabbit hole, which is great!

My educational background is in computer science and neuroscience, and I've done a fair bit of teaching and tutoring, primarily in mathematics and the sciences. I currently work as a software engineer at a startup and volunteer in the same capacity for a nonprofit. As is usual in the field, I have worked with many programming languages professionally; I have restricted my language-level userboxes to those that I currently employ on a day-to-day basis.

The handle Curunauth is a Sindarin name I created over a decade ago after discarding several initial attempts that produced Google results. Naturally, within roughly a month of my adoption of this unique handle, someone else independently generated it as the name of an NPC in a Lord of the Rings-themed RPG on a message board. C'est la vie. It employs the roots curu (craft/skill), nauth (thought), and tân (smith, back-derived from mírdan (jewelsmith)); "nauthan" is my attempt at a term for programmer, and I built that into a name similar to Curunír (used to refer to wizards in general as well as Saruman in particular). That connection of programming to wizardry was inspired by a Paul Rothemund's TED talk "Casting spells with DNA" - just as DNA comprises "words" that create physical objects when "read", thoughts expressed in computer code come alive and affect the world.

Hiswelókë's Sindarin dictionary by Didier Willis -- the etymological notes in particular are quite useful when trying to invent terms for things that don't exist in the language's original universe :-)