Mon Mar 03 2025
Through my life I have always had an interest in learning how to program. As a kid I started out with a book that promised to teach me to make games in Visual Basic. Beyond just copying the programs out of the book I was not able to grasp the concepts and couldn’t figure out why the syntax was so important. It seemed like some sort of sorcery that was unchangeable. My dreams of becoming a game developer died with my inability to do much beyond making the pong clone have different assets than the supplied assets that came with the book.
Later in life I still had the itch, but this was for different reasons. I wanted to make things that made my life easier. I needed a way to automate the boring stuff in my life. I needed a way to be able to do the interesting parts of my job while making the repetitive parts do themselves. I decided that I would come back and teach myself to program again but this time I had a real life application!
I needed a tool that would do data entry but I needed it done in a way that would automate the repetitive stuff. My work relied on interpreting blueprints and making decisions about device IDs and the unique names they would be assigned. The task was simple and repetitive. So much of my time was spent going back and fourth figuring out if device M-11 was taken and if that should be in the hallway or the break-room.
I found an online course on a website called unity and off I was on my journey. Every day after work I would spend about an hour learning and figuring out what programming was all about. It was so different from my attempt to learn programming as a kid. I had the support of the world, for any problem I had, if I could frame my question properly I could fix anything. Those days were magical, I would look forward to learning and be excited at the idea of making my computer do whatever I told it to do. I was unstoppable… as long as what I wanted to do could be done on the Java Virtual Machine.
Of course that point of my life I was living at the peak of mount stupid. I was experiencing the most exciting part of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I was the smartest guy and was the wizard in the high tower writing my incantations in the shape of spaghetti not knowing what I didn’t know.
When my feelings about myself started coming back down to earth and my confidence began to waver when tackling projects that were more than 100 lines of code I began to… learn about myself! It was wonderful. I was so excited that I still had more to learn and this excited me more than anything. I was figuring out just how deep this rabbit hole could go and I was just scratching at the surface. I had to learn more.
I decided that a formal education was the best route to go and that would give me the best foundation for this whole programming thing. I started at community college and found everything enthralling. I found something that I could do for a lifetime. For me all the subjects that weren’t about computer science were turned into a lesson about computers, how I related to them and how I could use them better. If I struggled with a physics problem I would write a little physics simulation so I could understand it in my own way. If I had a math concept that I found sort of boring I would look for ways that it could help me in programming. All these things were channeled into my love for writing code.
Then the gipity came out. everything turned gray and I’m sad now