“Everything is just ones and twos. Well not even ones and twos, but on and off.” This was one of the first things my father tried to explain to me at the beginning of my software engineering journey. At the time, the idea that just ones and twos or on and off could create the complex machine in front of me, filled me with bewilderment. It was amazing that there were scientists and programmers that were able to take such simple building blocks and from that, create the digital ecosystem around us. How in the world where they ever even able to think of that? Arguably more amazingly, this all happened in just approximately eighty years where we went from simple machines like the Model K using basic boolean logic in 1939 to now where massive super computers are used to solve complex algorithms. And the funny part is, as I’ve progressed through this journey, it’s lead me to realize how much I actually don’t know (but am eager to learn).
I think there is often a perception from others that computer science or software engineering is a “hard” science with little creativity. It’s all just memorization and filling in boilerplate code. However, this is far different from the reality that I have experienced. When I learn about designs in system components like the structure of the CPU, I get to see the problems the programmers experienced and the ingenuity they used to address them. The whole idea of using dynamic memory to quickly and efficiently access storage is a concept that I don’t think you can easily find in many other fields, which leads me to believe that this was a method that the original computer scientists may have come up with organically. And not only that, but just seeing how other programmers “cleanly” write code to solve leetcode problems or reduce the cycles needed in their program to make a calculation, really opens up the creativity that can be found in different aspects of computer science.
As I pick and muse over the project I will be working on for the next three months, I hope I will address it with the same ingenuity the computer science forefathers before me possessed. Well, at least a tiny smidgeon of it. I also look forward to see how my group partners will approach solving problems and what I can learn from them and take in to make my own. Because one of the beautiful parts of this field is that there are actually so many ways to write code and structure idea, but it’s our responsibility to find the best one. For me, that is where the creativity comes in.
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