{"id":8,"date":"2022-09-27T05:49:27","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T05:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/?p=8"},"modified":"2022-09-27T05:49:27","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T05:49:27","slug":"a-cs-journey-how-python-helped-me-overcome-my-fear-of-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/2022\/09\/27\/a-cs-journey-how-python-helped-me-overcome-my-fear-of-c\/","title":{"rendered":"A CS Journey- How Python helped me overcome my fear of C."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>MY CS journey started in the year 2001, when I was in 7<sup>th<\/sup> grade. In 2001 there was no YouTube, or the vast array of programming resources that are available on the internet today. The fastest internet connection I could get was dial up and internet speeds were super slow. I was given a C programming book by my dad and told to work through it. I remember getting to pointers and then getting completely lost, I spent days on programming forums asking questions. I eventually just gave up on C and programming in general. It all seemed so tedious to spend so much time writing many lines of code to implement basic features. As the metaphor goes, I was not able to see the forest for the trees. What I mean is that by getting stuck on pointers and not being able to write larger, more meaningful programs I was losing interest in programming and in some sense developing a fear of C because it seemed so hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I spent the next 10 years attending college, getting a degree in political science and Management Information Systems. I got married, divorced, married again, and got two Persian cats (Coco and Zoe) along the way. After graduating college, I got a job as a DevOps Engineer, mainly writing automation scripts for minor tasks in PowerShell. But it always bothered me that I gave up on C programming and I dreamed of transitioning to a development role in the future. But I associated development roles with knowledge and proficiency with C. I once again tried to learn C using a Udemy course and quickly lost interest. A coworker suggested python as an intro to programming and so I picked up a book on python programming. I combined the lessons from the book with tutorials on YouTube to quickly ramp up. After a month I put together my first python-based hangman game. After completing the game, it felt like this barrier of self-doubt and fear that existed in my mind for all these years just evaporated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It took me a few more years of programming in python, to realize I needed a more structured environment to complete my CS education. I applied to the OSU CS Post Baccalaureate program and this is my last quarter before graduation. I completed CS 340 which is intro to OS programming with C and I was very successful. I realize now that it wasn\u2019t so much that C is hard that stopped my progress initially when I was in 7<sup>th<\/sup> grade. But that I didn\u2019t have an end goal and that forced me to get bogged in learning C and programming in general. I think everyone learns differently and for me being successful with python allowed me to build the confidence and interest in learning C. I think it is important to have many ways of introducing young people to programming. It shouldn\u2019t start with C because you want to build interest by having them write quick functional programs that build\u2019s interest in programming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MY CS journey started in the year 2001, when I was in 7th grade. In 2001 there was no YouTube, or the vast array of programming resources that are available on the internet today. The fastest internet connection I could get was dial up and internet speeds were super slow. I was given a C [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12714,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12714"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/sayeedsadat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}