Since I was a kid I have always loved computers. I remember my first computer that had a big 4GB hard drive. We had a 28.8kbps modem and doubled our speeds to 56.6 not long after. It was amazing what you could do with it. Everything from writing word documents to learning interesting facts on the digital encyclopedia Encarta, not to mention the awesome games like jezzball and ski free. It was so much fun to do things that you couldn't do before.
From then on a lot of my time was spent on computers. Programming wasn't really something I did but I liked to try and figure out different ways to use computers, I played video games, and learned how they run. I was always the go to computer guy. I didn't know how to do everything, but I loved the challenge of trying to figure it out.
Then I graduated high school and decided I needed to choose what to do to with my life. Of course with my love of computers I naturally decided to go into business finance. I know that doesn't make sense. I thought computers would be a nice hobby but I wanted to make money in finance. Things were going well in my business classes. The things that I was learning were interesting and I even took a intro to computers class as a credit class. It was so easy that I only went to 2 classes. Well it was easy and started at 8:00am, so there wasn't a lot of motivation to get to class. Let me be clear though I don't condone skipping classes as I missed a midterm because I didn't go to the lectures. Fortunately I still passes the class and learned a valuable lesson on keeping and eye on my schedule. In any case, two years into post secondary I decided that this was not the path for me. There was good money to make in finance but I realised that I didn't want to do that for the majority of my life. What I learned while going to school was that I wanted to do something that I enjoyed. I didn't give up my business schooling that I had, but I simply added computer science as a dual degree.
Computer science was eye opening to me. It was very enjoyable but it was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. My first intro to programming class was hard. There were many hours spent in the computer lab trying to finish assignments. However, I had a love hate relationship with programming. It was difficult but man was it cool when I got it figured out. Most of my programming classes were like that. It was difficult at first but was exciting when I started to figure it out. Then the more advanced programming classes came along. I didn't do so well in those classes with some I just barely scrapped by. At the end of school I decided that programming wasn't really for me. There were a few programs that I made in school, but they weren't that great and they were really hard for me to do, so I decided that I would maybe do some programming on the side for fun but it wasn't going to be my career.
Shortly after graduating I found a job as a Business Analyst that I thought would be perfect for me. It was right in between the business side of things as well as working with computers. I need to understand the business needs of the organisation and then translate those into something that the programmers could use to create the programs. My wife called my the nerd-terpreter, because I could talk business as well as nerd. This was fun for a while, but while in that position my job description changed from Business Analyst to Business Improvement Specialist. I still got to do some computer stuff and some pseudo programming but eventually my business analyst position was disappearing. So, I started studying some more computer stuff again. I was reading networking books looking to transition into a general managed IT position. As well as reading some programming books to work on my own projects.
My brother then tells me that a business back where I grew up was looking for a programmer. I applied and surprisingly I got the job. It was nerve racking to say the least. I didn't feel like I had enough experience to have an actual programming job, but I worked as hard as I could to figure things out and do a good job. Then that love hate relationship came back. I enjoyed programming but it was hard to get up to speed on this project that I was working on. At first I wasn't sure that I would stick with it and become a full career programmer, but after about the first year I was hooked. This is really where my programming career started. It was time that I jumped all in and started to figure out how to be a professional programmer.
In this blog I will be going over how I went from a C student in computer science to a great professional programmer. Spoiler alert it takes a lot of work. There is so much to learn with programming that it can be very daunting. I thought to myself at first that there is no way that I can learn enough that people will want to pay me for what I love doing. Another fear that I had was that I wouldn't pick the right technology or programming language to learn, or I wanted to pick the programming language that would make me the most money. However, there were things that I learned as I went along that really helped me to focus and not worry about learning everything about everything.