I created my first hello-world repository on GitHub on March 22, 2018. And then proceeded learning JavaScript from the online bootcamp curriculum that was supposed to introduce me to programming and help people like me decide if coding is something I’d be interested in to dive a little deeper.
I took that dive.
And hey, look – here I am, writing about programming and why I chose this as my career.
To start off with the reasons why and what drove me to programming, I have to mention jigsaw puzzles first. As a kid, I loved the different shapes and colors and patterns of each little piece of a puzzle that would later transform into a marvelous picture. For a kid like me, what intrigued me the most was the process of putting two seemingly alike but different pieces together and have them tell a story via a joint pattern. In a kindergarten, I was the kid who brought my beautiful pictures-waiting-to-be-solved into the room and assembled and re-assembled them time and time again, even when I had learned the shapes and patterns by heart. I loved the process of this total focus and the image unfolding before my eyes. I guess I can say those were the times when I felt the power of my brain (probably without realizing it), and just stuck with it. I remember throwing a tantrum once when I couldn’t figure out how to solve a more challenging puzzle. I also remember my high school experience of solving a gigantic portrait-sized jigsaw puzzle which took me months - and I enjoyed the experience immensely. Now that picture of a puzzle is telling a story about me, the time and the dedication that I put into it.
Now, this story might have inspired you to believe that I was sculpted out to know I wanted to be a programmer at an early age. But this was not the case. As I was growing up, my bigger challenge had become to read copious amounts of text. It was all either fictitious or it was schoolwork: I absorbed every letter and passage, felt the information flowing into my brain, and my fascination with reading reached stunning levels, even to the point when I would devour a whole book in a day. And while it is true that I have learned a lot of valuable life lessons through literature, I might say it made me pursue a path in higher education that I was not a hundred percent sure I wanted to take.
To step back a little, I would like to mention my brief high school experience with computers and computer logic. While most of it at first was just dry information about how to properly call a monitor in my mother tongue and format a document in Word, at the end we were introduced to the concept of variables and div’s. And this is where the class was divided; some were doing great and some just looked at another’s monitor for an answer. This was the point where I again felt the challenge to push forward with what I had never before seen in my life. The familiar feeling of solving a “puzzle”, a problem, visited but I never ever dreamed of being a programmer myself.
For I had certain mental barriers in my adolescent years. As a teenager, I thought I had already figured myself and my life out! So I put this idea of doing some programming on my own to the side, and then after I graduated, it snuck into an invisible compartment of my brain. My love for books and writing was stronger at the time, so I pursued the aforementioned path in literature and languages. And while attending my classes, due to my reserved nature, I had a few inkling moments of doubting myself. Did I choose the right major..? What if my hobby to read was truly only a hobby, not a true career goal I would like to set for myself? These doubts grew roots and steadily blossomed… which wasn’t a beautiful picture of a jigsaw puzzle. It was more like a slap across the face from myself. But I got up. I brushed the dirt off my lost self and…
Here I am now!
I could not tell you the exact time when I made the decision to become what I am now, a programmer. Nor could I tell you about the gradual process of me becoming tech-savvy. I guess what speaks about the evolution of the “geek” part of my personality were the emergence of movies like Ex Machina (2014), Snowden (2016), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Each one of these movies sowed very important seeds of problem solving, and how it could translate into my will to help people with something as simple (and very complex and abstract at the same time) as lines of code combined with logic.
I also have my husband to thank for showing me the value of propositional logic in arguments, and the informal fallacies that most, if not all of us, commit on a daily basis, unaware. I was astounded, really, when I saw that a commonplace human interaction could translate into something as this:
This can be summarized as “If p then q; p; therefore q”. Does it not sound a lot like control flow in programming?
So, as I currently am making my way through object-oriented programming with Ruby, I would like to say to my future self and to whomever else is reading this: programming is awesome. Not only that, but in our day and age, it is paramount to being successful and a productive homo sapiens. What I love about writing code is that there’s vast areas to explore and discover such fascinating ideas and their implementations that people before me created. It’s an infinite loop of connecting to other people’s logic and their dedicated work. Just like jigsaw puzzles, we fall into the right places to help our fellow humans strive for more.