My journey: Humble beginnings

This is part one of my 3-part article going through my journey, and how I got to where I am at now.

I received my first computer when I was 8 years old. My parents bought it for me since they got it for very cheap at the time. I can’t clearly remember which brand it was, probably a Dell computer, but all I knew looking back is that the computer had horrible specs and could only be used to browse the web. That, however, did not stop me from trying to play Minecraft (this was when the game started to gather traction). Now, due to the performance I was getting, I could never really play in survival mode, and could only mess around in a super flat world in creative mode, which was probably why I was interested in messing around with redstone and making contraptions using it. This, unbeknownst to me at the time, was probably the start of my interest with Computer Science.

Much later on, when I was in Year 9, I started dabbling with learning how to code through tutorial, books, and courses. I still remembered the first course (“The Complete Python Bootcamp From Zero to Hero in Python” on Udemy) and book (Learn Python the Hard Way) I used to learn code. Granted, I didn’t get much from this besides the syntax of the language, as I stopped both when it got to the OOP section (which wasn’t very far in the tables of content 😆). After dabbling in a bit of cybersecurity (I thought I wanted to be a cool, professional hacker at the time 💀), I moved onto web design with The Odin Project, learning the basics like HTML/CSS/JS. The project also encouraged me to use Github, but I never figured out how to utilize it properly. I managed to build a few projects whilst following the curriculum and finish the “Foundations” section, but unfortunately after moving onto the “Full Stack Ruby on Rails” and getting stuck on one of the milestone projects, I gave up and focused on school work instead.

Did I continue on with coding, or did I give up? Continue reading to find out more in Part 2!