This is the start. From here on out you will ride along a journey of a father, husband and 34 year old nerd that decided to make a last minute decision to switch from Accounting and a year of schooling to Computer Science and 3 years of schooling. There is some context that I find might be important to this story, but before that I will give you a small roadmap of where we are going. This blog will give updates on the good and the bad of being a student in the computer science major, of what has been learned, what feels like is missing, the hopes and the failures. This will change with classes, with personal ventures and non-cs related learnings. That out of the way, context:

I have always been a gamer, avid book reader, fantasy consumer. I come by it honestly, my mom was a gamer, our first at home system that I can remember was an SNES. Many late nights watching my mom crush Wario Woods or Toys or PLOK. Of course, one day the student surpasses the master, and a 30+ year of console and PC gaming was to follow. I give you this to point out, I never had an interest in making games. I was never in the modding scene, didnt have an interest in robotics, never once looked at a line of code. I enjoyed escapism, whether thats books, TV or games. So where did that lead me? Down a road of customer service for over twelve years, only to realize I hated the situation I was in. Thankfully life blessed me with a really good support system that allowed me to quit work and become a full time student at 31.

It had been the plan to get my accounting degree, so I enrolled to Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon to finish off my transfer degree. After two terms I had applied and was accepted to Eastern Oregon Universities Online accounting degree program, had my entire class schedule planned for the year and half it would take, just had two more terms left at Chemeketa to do before I started at Eastern. During that second to last term I took a Computer Science class by accident thinking it was a Computer Information Systems class, a fluffy elective. That single class changed just about everything. I am not a risk taker, nor someone that makes decisions lightly. But it felt right to change course and pursue a degree I knew literally nothing about, had no experience in for a career I was wholly unprepared for.

So to speed things up, I have non-stop communication with the academic department at Oregon State trying to figure out if it was even possible for me to start within the same time frame I had planned for Eastern Oregon. And the rest, as they say, is boring school work grinding the life out students.

So, here we are. Welcome to the world of Chris Butler the unprepared Computer Science major trying their best to pretend to know everything else everyone does. There will be a lot of learning here, some will be simple things that most people know, others may not be. Either way, its my journey and I hope it’ll help someone out there.