Hello Norrath!

Hail, and well met. I am Jorarzen, Wood Elf Ranger of Kelethin. Well, no, I’m not. I’m Mitch Campbell. But from 2001 to 2003, I was more elf than man. Getting Everquest (and its various expansions) to actually run on the family computer was my first part-time IT job. It was a huge hassle, but if I didn’t kill all those Crushbone orcs for their belts, then who would?

Struggling my way past installation errors and scouring enthusiast forums for arcane and esoteric knowledge about how to fix “missing DLL file” messages after each update or patch release was my first exposure to how computers worked on a deeper level than simply double-clicking on the Math Blaster icon. I enjoyed fiddling with computers, but our family only had the one, and we all had to split time on it, so I didn’t get exposed to them all that much (so little, in fact, that I was one of the worst typists at the outset of my rural North Carolina middle-school typing class). The only programming class that my high school offered was Intro to Computer Programming taught using QBASIC, which was already a decade out of date when I took the class in the mid-2000s. That was just about the depth of my expertise with computers for the next decade or so. I would spend a few weeks here and there building a gaming PC, or learning the basics of Python, or mocking up a website for fun, but it never went much further than that.

In 2017, I started a job that required me to do certain tasks in Excel multiple times a day. The tasks were repetitive and prone to human error. After a few weeks, I started wondering how much of my work I could automate. At first, this just meant learning to use simple Excel formulas. Then came more complex Excel formulas. Then came recording VBA (a flavor of the Visual Basic programming language) macros. Then came editing those macros, which required actually learning some VBA. Then came writing macros from scratch and passing them around to my colleagues doing similar work. This is when I really started to understand how powerful a deeper knowledge of computers could be. Even knowing just a little bit, I was able to meaningfully improve the quality and efficiency of my work while also improving my experience while doing that work.

Ultimately, that experience led me to where I am today: my final quarter of OSU’s CS bachelor’s program. Computers, once only a source of imparsable error messages and frustration keeping me from slaying ever more orcs have now, for me, become a passion and a source imparsable errors and frustration keeping me from deploying my damn code.