Hello, World!
Hello, world, and welcome to my blog! Here I will mostly blog about my experience as a self-taught programmer hoping to make the leap into professional software development. This coming year is going to be an interesting one for me with my current job’s contract expiring in little over a month and hopefully Firebootcamp in September. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide useful information in my posts. Failing that, I hope my posts are entertaining at the very least. I will also try and attach a recent photo I’ve taken to each post just to keep the blog from turning into a wall of text.
A little about myself
I’m a BSc graduate that majored in Astrophysics. In my penultimate year I did a vacation scholarship with a professor of mine whereby I had to compile, execute and make small modifications to a large program that modeled the fusion process within a star. The code was all written in Fortran 77 which may as well have been Greek. I had never done any programming before and was thrown into the deep end with the project. With the help of a post-graduate student who was studying under that professor, I was able to eventually understand what was expected of me. I left the project feeling like I had accomplished something and with a new desire to understand more about how programs like the one I had been working on were created.
After graduating, I picked up a book called Headfirst C# which introduced me to C# and the .NET framework. It was an enjoyable read that gave me a starting point from which I could learn more. I wrote a few quick and dirty programs for use at work (one was an application that simply iterated through a dictionary and renamed computers using the command prompt while another spawned a thread for each computer in a list and used the Windows dir command to look for PST files on remote machines) which introduced me to more advanced topics like multithreading and interacting with other programs from within the application. Soon after completing those applications I started reading about ASP.NET and MVC. At some point while learning about both I realised that I was missing pieces of the puzzle. I could walk through the examples but I was severely limited in what I could do because of my lack of web development experience so I picked up HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript from another Headfirst book. As anyone who has ever pursued knowledge would tell you, when you pursue one thing you often become aware of related areas that you were unaware of initially. While learning about the three web technologies I mentioned above, I heard about a scripting language called Ruby, which I soon picked up and very much enjoy playing with.
Plans for the future
Ultimately, I want to be part of something similar to what I hear about in the states. Small companies pop up, offering some creative software service and have a lot of fun building their product in the small team they have created. I want to work on an innovative product with other people that I can learn from and, in time, share my own knowledge with.
Other interests
While I enjoy creating programs, I also have other hobbies. I bought myself an Olympus OM-D EM-5 a number of months ago and enjoy nothing more than wandering through a festival taking photos of people enjoying themselves. Unfortunately I’ve also grown quite fond of travelling after my trip to Japan at the end of 2012. If only it was as cheap a hobby to satisfy as snapping a few photos with my camera.
I’m also a massive nerd. I love technology, computer hardware, games, and all the cool things people are doing to integrate technology with our lives. It is a pretty exciting time to be a nerd.
