Okay, I'm a computer scientist, so what computery things do I do?
WEB:
Well, for starters, there's this website! I really enjoy web design, and have maintained (or not!) a personal website since I got here. It started off extremely basic , designed in MS-Word (of all things!) I then learned how to code HTML and redid the old site (pretty much identically) entirely in pure, clean, hand-coded HTML.
Then we did a practical, in 2nd year, that involved learning a bit of PHP, and my eyes were thus opened to the wonderful world of scripts and dynamic website generation, which prompted me to attempt a D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) character generator in PHP. I quickly realised that a character generator would be much more sensible if it were client-side, so I went about teaching myself JavaScript, and ended up with a rather nice, smart, functioning (if rather simplistic, and somewhat incomplete) D&D character generator.
And then I discovered CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is a browser-based "extension" to HTML that allows for extremely flexible and imaginative design - much more so than plain HTML. Also, because it depends largely on the browser to interpret simple parameters, it doesn't slow things down much at all. Anyway, hence Dunkyboy.com as it now stands. Let me know what you think of it.
[Note: It's worth remembering that CSS is relatively new, at least in its current form, and older browsers sometimes have trouble with it. It's always worth keeping your browser up to date. For a lean, mean, cutting edge browsing experience, try Mozilla Firefox (used to be known as Phoenix, and then Firebird). It's free, it's fast, it ain't bloated, it has tabbed browsing, oodles of power features - you'll love it.]
JAVA:
Although the Edinburgh Department of Computer Science has been dilligently trying to teach me (and the rest of us CS-ers) Sun Microsystem's [relatively] newfangled object-oriented programming language Java from the very beginning of first year, I only managed to become comfortable with it the summer of '01 (i.e. after two years of CS). And I only managed this by taking on a wee project of my own and effectively teaching myself Java. Silly, no? But at least I do "know" Java now. (Yay me!)
Well, naturally the wee project has snowballed into something quite unfathomably large and tricky for one poor Java newbie, but I still trudge on with it, when I get the chance. I do this because it's a lot of fun (and not to mention it's a very effective learning experience!) My project is a game called Rodpog. It will one day (fingers crossed) be a simple role-playing game. Ideally I would have it playable as an applet on this very website, though that may be a little far-fetched.
I chose to do an RPG because 1) I like RPGs, 2) I didn't want to mess with fancy graphics, and 3) they afford you endless scope for creative thinking and imagination, as you're never bound by rules or obligations. It really is a lot of fun to design and code, but it's also a rather big challenge, as it's still a learning experience and I find myself having to teach myself something new whenever I do each little bit. And because of this it's coming along veeeery slooooowly. Don't expect to see a playable beta for a good long while!
OTHER STUFF:
Although web design and Java are my two main areas of computery knowledge and wisdom, I have dabbled in other things in the past (largely thanks to my course).
For instance, in first year I took Artificial Intelligence as an outside course, whereupon we were taught (ha!) the demented logic-based programming language known as Prolog. Prolog was actually invented at Edinburgh Uni (a long time ago in a galaxy... you get the idea), which says a lot. It's insane because it requires you to think backwards, in a strange sort of way... It's kinda cool, really, and I'm sure it has numerous interesting uses (mainly in AI - which also says a lot), but I could never really get my head round it.
Another "thing" I've touched on thanks to my course is SQL, the ubiquitous database Structured Query Language (supposedly the most widely-used language in the world). It's not a programming language, really, but a database manipulation language that lets you create, manage, and view all sorts of databases, and is used very frequently in the web. In fact, that PHP practical I told you about was actually a PHP/SQL practical wherein we had to design a simple PHP search engine that searched an SQL database. I've since had a lot more experience using PHP for dynamic website generation - for instance, the photo archive section of this website is all generated on the fly by a PHP script I concocted. It lets me upload pictures without having to edit any HTML - I just name the files according to a certain format, stick 'em in the right directory and hey presto, instant gallery. That's what dynamic website generation is all about.
By the way, my first experience with programming was with QBASIC! I decided one day (I must have been 12 or 13) to find out what this business of programming was all about by teaching myself QBASIC with nothing but the built-in help files! Needless to say I didn't get very far... I then moved on to the Texas Instruments version of BASIC for my TI-86 graphic calculator (was maybe 15 by now) and got it to do some slightly more intersting things, though again (largely thanks to a shortage of documentation) I didn't really get very far. And that was it for me and programming until I came here.