So somehow I’ve made it to 2022 without having blogged regularly. What follows are my best attempts at narrating my experience in CS 467 at Oregon State University, taken in the Spring of 2022. This blog is a required component of my grade, but I’ll be doing my best to keep this readable and interesting.

I will, by necessity, be providing somewhat of a dinosaur, or Rip Van Winkle’s perspective on the challenges posed in this course. While I’ve always been one of the more technical people in my friend groups, I have somewhat tumbled backwards into CS; this coupled with my antagonistic relationship with the Miasma that is the Internet these days means I’m usually the last person finding out about things.

This dinosaur’s journey with technology really exploded when my family moved into a neighborhood that abutted a dump, when I was living overseas. My friends and I found old printers, fax machines, microwaves, and other sundry electronics that had been discarded, and took them apart to see how they worked. When we moved to the States, I found that I’d acquired an affinity for solving computer issues that would cause my father to throw his hands up in frustration. This, coupled with the necessary persistence and ingenuity required to run emulators on a PC built in ’95, put me in good technical stead by the time I’d made it to college. I found CS more fun than Math, during my first degree, and translated my skills into a job supporting websites. Years and trips across the globe and a family later, and I’m falling in love with the discipline I’d been courting all over again, and getting paid to program. Miracles can happen!

I think the leitmotif over the course of my educational career, through music, to anthropology, to CS, has been a love of language. Not knowing project assignments yet, I’m not sure how my technical perspective and linguistic affinity will manifest themselves this term, but I can’t wait to dig my teeth into my last programming assignment of the program.

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