Welcome to the blog! I am excited and eager to get started with my final semester at OSU as a post-bac CS student. Over the past 2-3 years I have been in the process of changing careers from veterinary medicine to software development. I have been working as a small animal (dogs/cats) veterinarian for the past ~5 years (with some small breaks to pursue SWE internships) in Northern Virginia. Quite the career pivot…
I’ll spare everyone from delving into the reasons for my discontentment with my current profession and try to focus on why I chose to pursue computer science. To put it simply: 1. I enjoy building things and 2. I enjoy spending time in front of computers. This sounds trite, but it’s true. Whether it’s a small personal project or a larger application used in production, I find enjoyment in creating something that may be useful to people, learning some new tech, and even just the process of programming itself. Now more than ever, it has never been easier to whip up a new project and display your coding wizardry in your little corner of the internet on github. I initially started learning to code on my own from my brother, who graduated several years ago with a degree in computer science. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was what I wanted to do for a living and make the plunge to go back to school.
My goals for this course include getting more comfortable using git, expanding my general programming knowledge, and hopefully, building something cool. In the two software development internships I have done throughout this program, both teams I worked with used git. I (very quickly) found that using/understanding version control was an area where I was severely lacking. Beyond the basics (pulling, pushing, commiting) I had not really ever used git in a team setting. Learning things like rebasing, squashing commits, and tracking a local branch was all new to me. While I learned a lot, I am looking forward to getting more experience with version control again before graduating. I also would be interested in learning a new language/framework/technology, but would not be opposed to expanding on my existing knowledge of something I am already familiar with!
I look forward to reading other blog posts and seeing everyones projects this term!
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