When I was attempting to learn C for Oregon State University’s Operating System’s class, almost every time I ran my scripts, I would get an error letting me know that I needed to put a semicolon somewhere. This upset me for a variety of reasons:
- JavaScript and Python didn’t care about semicolons. Those languages were smart enough to figure out that obviously when I put a new line in somewhere, that meant I was done with whatever I was doing.
- If Visual Studio is smart enough to tell me I need a semicolon, why doesn’t it just add a semicolon, or warn me before I compile everything?
- The real reason, it was a constant reminder that I have no idea what I’m doing, and there’s absolutely no way I’m going to become fluent in C by doing 6 projects.
I BARELY understand what a semicolon does in the English language, and I’ve been speaking it my whole life.
Before taking these classes, I went to University of Oregon and double majored in Economics and Theatre. It started as just an Economics major, but by junior year I realized that Theatre was fun and (outside of Game Theory) econ just isn’t. I was three classes away from finishing my econ major, so I finished it up, but after school I left to Chicago to peruse the stage life.
In Chicago, I spent 4 years hanging lights and doing tech for musical improv shows while giving what little money I had to Second City for musical improv classes that mostly taught me that while I love theatre and comedy when I can do it at my own pace, I don’t love it enough to be doing it 8 hours a day while working at Starbucks.
Luckily, I met my wife at a Halloween party (she was in a distance relationship at the time, but it was an easily rectifiable situation), and after a few years she got into grad-school at Kent State in Ohio. I was more than happy to leave Chicago seeing as in my mind I had just wasted all my time and money on something I only kind of enjoyed as a hobby, and so off to Ohio I went.
In Ohio, my theatre-tech skills transitioned into a job working at a hospital doing audio-visual work for the doctor’s meetings. This was, in my eyes, the greatest job ever. It paid over twice what I got at Starbucks or any improv theatre company and most days were 2 hours of work and 6 hours of playing games on my laptop in my office. Also I had an office. It was nuts. With this free time I thought “I’m pretty good at tech stuff. I have a fancy computer. I’ve never coded, but I’ve edited some code for video games. Maybe I should do computer science.” Then Covid hit and I had even less to do, and so here we are, in the last term of this computer science program desperately trying to figure out what’s next.
Now I have moved back to Portland and went full time into school, which will allow me to finish this program in less than two years. This means I’ll have less than two years experience coding when I go searching for a job. I can pass classes, some of my code is okay, but I just don’t feel like I’ve “learned how to code”. That’s not a knock against the program, it’s just that no one can learn an entire skillset that encompasses dozens of languages in less than two years. My professional life has been a mess of not understanding what I enjoy, or what I even want out of a career, and know at the tail end of this program, I’m about to end another chapter. I’m about to go into a world I don’t understand and again pretend I know what I’m doing. Will this be the last career I enter into, period? Will coding be another weird phase I write a paragraph about in another attempt at finding out what I want out of my career, comma? As of now I enjoy it a lot. It’s the combination of structure and creativity I feel like I’ve been searching for, but it’s hard to feel confident after moving around the country just getting more confused.
Looking back on it all though, I feel like I was too grumpy about my perceived failures. During spring break I (poorly) coded up a Inn-Running-Simulation for my homebrew DnD campaign in Python, which is the dream combination of economics, theatre and computer science that I never knew I wanted. I feel like maybe the problem wasn’t so much that I couldn’t find what I wanted, but that I perceiving stepping-stones as wasted time. Maybe it’s time to give in and learn to love the semicolon.
I’m sure later posts will be more technical. I’ll talk about what’s working, what isn’t and how my final project is going. However, while you read that, if you somehow keep track of who’s writing which post and what they’ve written before, do me a favor and append this to the end of ever single sentence I ever write:
My name is Sam Cain and I have no idea what I’m doing, semicolon.
