My journey: Charting the unknown waters

This is part two of my 3-part article going through my journey, and how I got to where I am at now. If you haven’t read it, check it out here: Part 1

During my A-levels, I remember applying my knowledge for the EPQ, making fake popular websites like Amazon and Google to write about cybersecurity. As I took Computing, I was forced to learn Java, which finally allowed me to understand what OOP was like (Though I hated writing code in Java). Funnily enough, I did my A-Level Computing project using Python instead of Java, which was a map generator for an old-school roguelike-style game. This project, while simple in the tools necessary as it was just using pygame, gave me a fascinating look at different algorithms, like BSP or Cellular Automata.

It wasn’t until I got into Durham which everything started taking off rapidly. Thanks to the engaging lectures, challenging courseworks, as well as a group of extremely talented individuals hanging out around me (it still is the case now), my motivation for programming skyrocketed. In that year alone, I learned more than the past year combined. I got to know how to properly use Git and work collaboratively on projects, learned how to use NPM and code a dynamic one-paged website, got used to looking up and reading papers to solve challenging programming problems, … the list goes on. This is not to mention the theoretical knowledge I got from the lectures themselves. Even during this busy year, I even got myself to go to my first hackathon ever, and made a really cool Unity project within a 24hr time limit.

What happened after the year during the summer breaks? Or curious about my experience during my next school year? Read more in Part 3!