Hello everyone! I’m Michael Iwanek, currently in CS 467 – Capstone as my last class in the OSU Computer Science Program. This is my first post required for that class.
My first exposure to programming in an academic setting was a computer class in my Accounting program – making HTML sites. We made some extremely simple pages completely in Notepad – and I was under the impression all programmers coded in Notepad or the command prompt, which I was very uninterested in. I may have been exposed to some very basic HTML or JavaScript before then but nothing that grabbed my attention.
After graduating – I worked as a tax accountant/ CPA for a year and a half. In that role, I used Excel in workbooks to analyze financial data – often involving formulas with IF statements or other Excel tools to do so. What I didn’t understand at the time was that functions like VLOOKUP below were really indexing into an array, and that there was an entire world of IDEs, debugging, and tools hidden beyond the Excel formula window.
I eventually left that role for one with fewer hours but where tasks were done every month instead of yearly. It was there I self taught myself VBA to automate all the reports I had to download and format in Excel every month. I was shocked that if I worked hard enough to write a program and iron out the bugs, it could do work that would take me hours faster than any person could ever do – and do it perfectly. I was completely hooked and automated parts of my job whenever I could. Creating custom dashboards in Excel that would open internet explorer to download files, insert formulas, and other tasks.
I eventually stumbled upon this program at OSU as a way to transition to a software engineer. About two years later, I am now a full stack software engineer intern at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Instead of Excel, I now work in Visual Studio code (in dark mode which is amazing) – Visual Studio, pgAdmin, Docker, and a plethora of other tools. I am constantly learning and being challenged every day – and am extremely grateful that this post-bacc program allowed me to make this transition.
I’m very excited to wrap up this program with the capstone class and go out strong with a project I can meaningfully contribute to.