I first got interested into computers was back in 2003, when my parents bought me and my brother’s first desktop computer. I often saw my brother sitting hours long in front of the computer, tinkering and playing with various settings. At that time, however, I never got as enthusiastic into computers as my brother was. I never thought anything special about computer hardware and software, as it seem liked a given, that it works.
The first time I really started to wonder how computers work was years later when I opened up one of my old computers and checking the guts of the computer. My little 9 year old brain was astonished how many cables there were connecting everything to a board, and how the computer was just actually a board. I tried taking it apart to see more, but was never able to assemble the ribbon cables back into a functional computer, which made me quite sad at that time.
On the otherside of hardware, I got a small taste of computer coding was a few years earlier where online fourms were still the rage. While I was posting something, I fiddle around with some words that magically turns your posts into various styles, and formats. At that time I didn’t know it was HTML, but I loved figuring out the patterns of what each word did and how combining them would make or break my post format.
That was pretty much all my experience with tinkering with computer hardware and software before going to high school. After I got into high school, I took a computer science class which taught Microsoft Visual Basics. I never really got the gist of the class, so I was really just crusing by and learning only the basics and nothing more.
Fast forward to graduating from college, I started working in the insurance sector, and I was not very enthusiastic about my job, calling and selling things, it was a nightmare of a job to do. It was around this time I really started to get more interested into computer hardware and software. I started out building my first PC, it was a very fun and a stressful experience. After this, I bought some Python beginners coding guides and started coding the simple games and applications on the guides. Now I think about it, I was really glad I started out with Python instead of C/C++. Python was really easy to understand and intuative for the beginner me. I learned a lot of the basics of coding and such through Python, without having to deal with more complex issues, such as memory allocation, that would have probably killed my enthusiasim.
After that I wanted to have a formal education in computer science, thus I applied for the OSU post-bacc degree and here I am studying for just over an year, and graduating just around the corner.
Over the past year or so, I’ve enjoyed the program at OSU. This will be my last semester here at OSU. I am currently taking CS467, Capstone and CS492, Mobile development, classes. Soon, I’ll be looking for my first job in the industry, and hoping to start my career as a software engineer.