My initial interest started in 2011 when my computer had all but Solitaire, FreeCell, Minesweeper (never figured that one out) and chess which would inevitably beat my 9yr old self every single time. Like many computer enthusiasts, our liking starts in gameplay. But mine was a mix between gameplay and the frustration of technical issues. You see, my computer used to shut off randomly, or get the Blue Screen of Death. Naturally, I’d try to troubleshoot so I could return to whatever memory heavy game I was playing. Eventually, through this experience, I became more curious about how computers work and how could I fix the errors? A tinkerer you’d say, but I was far from it. In fact, I probably made matters worse at the time, but hey, what can a 12yr old do?
Eventually, I took my first computer science class in school in which i’ll never forget using Snap! as my very first “kid-friendly” programming language. I’ll admit, I would get frustrated at times. Thinking in this logic was not familiar to me. Eventually, I would go on to take computer science here at OSU to which I admit, the logic still doesn’t always come to me. However, through persistence and curiosity I’ve been able to build applications I never thought I’d know how to do. My favorite project so far has been a full stack application which uses OpenAI’s API to generate song recommendations based on user input. A demo video can be found here.
I’ve been fortunate enough to gain internship experience as a Backend Engineer this past summer. I was the companies first intern so I was kind of like the “guinea pig” for them possibly launching a formal intern program in the future. As a result, I will be eager to share about my experience in a later post.
