During this OSU postbacc program, the courses primarily focused on Python. Yes, Python is one of the most popular programming languages right now and it has prepared for me my job interviews. However, after talking to software engineers and researching the web, I discovered that Java is actually the most popular programming language for backend engineering.
When I started this program, I thought computer science was just programming. I didn’t know there were different branches of computer science like frontend, backend, security, and machine learning. I thought that all software engineers did a little bit of everything. But after starting this program, I realized that there are tons of different branches of computer science.
At first, I wasn’t sure what type of software engineering I wanted to work with in the future. When I took my web development class, I had fun creating the website and playing around with the UI. I was able to see my contributions in live time. I’ve always been interested in design but I never pursued it because I had no talent in drawing. It was great how I was able to design something just by using code. My goal then was to become a frontend engineer.
After taking the database class and the cloud applications class, I’ve found joy in backend engineering. It gave life to the frontend web application. Creating different API endpoints to extract data from a database was a different type of coding than web development. It was definitely more challenging and felt more like I was working behind the scenes.
This summer, I interned as a frontend engineer for Walmart. During this internship, I coded and deployed a dashboard from scratch. The backend was already existing so all I had to do was to call some API endpoints and display it on my dashboard. At first, I thought the work was interesting because it was my first time working in an actual company. However, I soon realized that frontend engineering was not my passion.
I was lucky enough to land an backend engineering intern position at a local finance company for the fall. Here, I am working mainly on backend projects such as web services using Java Spring Boot and creating batch processes using Java Spring Batch. Having almost no experience with Java, I was worried at first that I won’t be able to finish the tasks I was given. However, my manager and mentor were very supportive and told me that I will be able to learn Java as I work on the tasks they give me.
This week, I deployed one project of my own – my first ever Java Spring Batch process. It felt very rewarding to have my own program of version 0.0.1 to be deployed to production. I felt a sense of ownership of this program and the program is my child now. I am excited to learn more about Java and different libraries as I work at the company for the next two months. I hope I gain more knowledge in Java so that I can create more programs of my own.
