What I Know Now

This’ll be my first blog post and as I understand it, it’s an open assignment. If this seems way too dreamy, bear with me.

I thought my first blog post should summarize my experiences over the past two years in the program but I think I will settle for just rattling off the technical stuff as to what I know about computer science now.

Back then, I thought making a project required specific sets of knowledge but that it had to be acquired through didactic learning regimens. For example, if I was to make a website, I’d have to go through a course of HTML/CSS/Javascript at least. Unfortunately, that kind of learning can be very long, monotonous and incredibly rigid. What happens if that didactic regimen doesn’t cover say, web hooks? Well, you’re forced to learn the concept on your own and having to pursue your own knowledge can feel terrifying. What if you get the concept wrong? What if you waste a bunch of time? What happens if you research something and it turns out to not be what you’re looking for?

Thankfully, going through the course helped me learn things on the fly and help me develop confidence in my learning abilities. For example, in my Intro to Operating Systems class, I learned how to read documentation to help myself out. That terrified me because there was a bunch of stuff that I didn’t understand on that document. Frankly, there’s a bunch of different ways to interpret those! But by failing for hours, days and sometimes even weeks I got better at it. Sure I probably spent a lot of time learning things I never needed to bother to learn but I refined the process of learning.

I have become a lot more confident in making projects along the way but not so much when it comes to making original ideas. Hopefully more experience can help with that!