“Hello world!”

Welcome! My name is Joe and this is my new blog where I will chronicle my journey toward becoming a software engineer as I work toward completing my capstone project as a soon-to-graduate CS senior at Oregon State University (OSU). Since this is a programming blog, in an effort to maintain balance in the force, I have chosen to keep the “Hello world!” title for my initial post. You may see this blog change a bit over the course of the next 11 weeks as it evolves through the fall term. But I encourage you to come along for the ride with me!

To give you a little bit of information about myself, I am a professional Forester and Wildland Firefighter; I have worked in this field for around 8 years. When I started my original college journey way back in 2006 I started as a Computer Science Major. Back then I was a little bit unsure of my path still and was quickly developing a great love of the outdoors, which is why I ended up switching majors. After all this time the question of “What if ?” has never left me, and I have always continued to program as a hobby (weird right?!). In 2019 I decided that I would go back and follow my dream and prove to myself that I was smart enough to major in CS and here I am now with the Highest GPA I have ever maintained in my life! But enough about me…I’m excited to start this blog and I am going to leave you with 3 tips to the first week of capstone (even though I am currently living it and navigating these things myself.)

1. Start Researching Your Project Early:
   I can’t stress this one enough! As I am writing this I so wish I did a better job of brainstorming for my capstone project beforehand. I know that ultimately I will work hard with my team and come up with a great idea and end product, but having a great and unique idea to finally build out after you have been able to think about it and plan all of the neat features it might have, well it would be pretty cool!
2. Don’t overthink it:
   We all have a lot going on outside of capstone whether it be real life stuff, other classes, etc… Just remember to be good to yourself and take it easy, follow the process and to some degree let things evolve organically. Always remember things will work out in the end as long as you do your best to manifest positive energy into everything you do…don’t sweat the small stuff, you can do this!
3. Be excited, be very excited:
   Though we have a long road ahead of us in our projects, this is such an exciting time! For most of us we are very near to graduating and getting one step closer to being professional software engineers. This is our time to showcase our abilities and skills that we have gained through our hard work as students. Get ready for the grind, those 100 hours are going to be filled with all kinds of new learning and coding, lots of coding, but we all know the rewarding feeling when we compile and it runs! At the end of this we will all have a spiffy new project to showcase and that’s something to be excited about!

Thanks for reading, and as always, Happy Coding!

The Mighty Code Beard