The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled
– Plutarch1
In this blog post I’ll talk about my fascination with computers and how I got into programming.
Computers
I think my first interaction with a computer was my Dad’s IBM computer when I was 6 years old. I played MechWarrior 3 on it. I remember liking lasers more than missiles as missiles would run out.
I did play a lot of video games when I was a kid. I especially liked Mario 64 and Blizzard games like Diablo 2 and Starcraft. Back in the early 00’s (when the Internet + Google just came out) there was a WYSIWYG site builder called Geocities where you could build websites.
I built a site for Diablo 2 hints and had a section where you could figure out Horadric Cube recipes (you put stuff inside a box and you get better stuff out of it).
When I was a kid, I was also curious as to how computers worked and tried to read a ‘How computers work’ book at school during recess.
I also built some maps for various PC games like Warcraft 3 (a heroes vs heroes map called war.w3m) and Counter Strike 1.6 (fy_alcove was pretty popular in Russia 🇷🇺). Unfortunately in my Counter Strike map there was one bug 🐞 where one team would spawn half-way frozen in a glass floor so you had to shoot it to get out and move around the map 🤣.
Programming
My first computer science course was AP Computer Science AB which I took at Singapore American School when I was a sophomore. I remember learning Java and not liking it as much as I had to wait for the program to compile before running it. At the same time I also took a 3d modeling course where I learnt Maya. I remember winning a prize for best 3d picture which I made an abstract thingy; my prize was a yummy Subway sandwich at the SAS cafe 🤣.
When I went to Bali on vacation in 2019 I started to pretend that I was a digital nomad and worked on a blog. Back then I was unknowingly using the JAMSTACK (JavaScript, APIs, Markup).
I didn’t really know what any of the terms meant: Ruby, or npm, or nunjucks. But it was alot of fun to program things, learn from the internet and figure things out.
Then in 2021 when COVID was happening I decided to try a career change from accounting to programming when I took the Devmountain bootcamp and really enjoyed it. I also took some introductory CS courses at Oregon State University’s online Postbacc program including CS161, and CS162 where I re-learned Python and built a mancala game.
Since then I have been loving programming as it’s instant feedback, quite deep, fun to build stuff, and has a cool online community.
It’s fun to have that ‘oh damn you can do that’ moment. Thanks for reading! I hope you can follow your curiosity too 😊
Here’s Andy Jassy being curious:
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