As a pre-teen and early teenager, I spent a lot of time playing video games online. My involvement in communities around the games I played exposed me to a lot of hobbies related to computers. The first that I pursued was digital design.
I spent years creating artwork on computers and still do on occasion. I progressed from creating simple artwork for my forum profiles to artwork for musicians and businesses. I wasn’t the best and I don’t always enjoy it, but I was good enough that I enjoyed helping friends and family that needed help.
One natural progression of learning digital design over a decade ago, in my opinion at least, was to learn web development. Web development was my first foray into programming. I learned HTML and CSS fairly easily. But I struggled to learn anything more complex.
In high school, we had a couple programming classes. They weren’t really advanced, or modern even. The first of which was a simple web development course that taught how to build websites using tables. The second course taught visual basic.
Visual Basic was simple enough for me to grasp some of the basic concepts like if-else statements and for loops. It made creating graphical user interfaces easy. I probably thought it was perfect back then. But I stopped programming shortly after that class ended.
During my first stint in college, I was struggling to choose a major and ended up taking a single programming course. This was my first time using Python. When I was younger, Python was recommended to me because it was easy to learn, but I still thought it was too difficult then. After this course, I would stop programming more for years again.
Now, as I’m about to graduate from Oregon State, I spend most of my time programming in JavaScript it seems, but I’m most confident with Python. I’ve been exposed to many other languages like C, C#, Rust, and Dart. I’ve learned how to use popular frameworks like React online without the help of a formal teacher.
My programming journey has been long. It has always been something that has interested me, but I guess it wasn’t the right time for me to learn it until now. When I was younger I was overwhelmed by how much there was to learn and what you could do with programming. But now, as an adult, navigating documentation is pretty much an everyday occurrence. I’ve had a great time at OSU, and look forward to continuing learning and solving problems for the rest of my career.
