An endless CS journey

This kind of posts to write is my favorite because I do type and words just fall as plain as VanillaJS ! When I write a tutorial or a technical post I do enjoy the task, but it’s not that much offhand, it’s still planning, reviewing testing and so much “calculations”! These posts however are “just me” ! I remember once an interviewer told me “Reading some of your articles since I checked your application made me think you better fit in for poetry, you write about programming with empathy“ (Yes, he said that !! ). Though I sometimes do write poetry as he recommended, and despite I do Believe in Arts and literature , I would Be and Stay in computer science and IT, simply because it’s Arts added to science.

I am sharing with you here how I started out with computer science and why I think it’s the BEST field one could major in . It’s gonna be a relatively long, but much fun read ! Don’t you forget I write about CS with empathy as that dude said !

Where it all started

         High school, at 17 years old !

“in a CS class at high school” is the answer of many programmers and software engineers when you ask them “When did you wrote the first lines of code”. This is my case too. First programming language I ever learnt, back in 2010, was Pascal . The class was an introduction to computer science, presenting theories about the basics of computer architectures, operating systems and networking; in addition to an introduction to data structures and iterative and conditional statements, using many much examples with Pascal language. I passed the national exam (equivalent of a high school exit exam) with an A+ on CS section. And it was quit fair as I loved the courses and tests I took before passing. I didnt loved them to the point of wanting to go for CS as a college major though ! I was blinded back then  !

         Family/society driven

Then when I had to decide on a College major, I loved to chose an arts major, like, explicit art ! Or a major in litterature or even law. However, the well-known controversy of “artists don’t make a living of their art” and “should artists make art or make money” came into my parents minds, as well as all the society-driven thoughts of my peers and friends that were influencing me to envision a career where I can “make a living” ! So I spent a little time searching for  an answer to ” what is it that field where I can be creative, make money and still be in science ? “ as I am starting from a mathematics and science basis already.

         A decision

Answering that question didn’t took me much, despite the fact that I knew almost no thing about the vast Information Technology field I was going to integrate. I chose Computer science because it’s about Creativity and Genius, because it’s what the world is heading for, and it’s where one could imagine, conceive, prototype and build with maths and smarts.

         And it starts !

Deciding on it, having enough bravery or intelligence to be in computer science for my whole life or at least for many years of it wasn’t fun back then. It never is fun when your mind and guts don’t get along ! My intuition was “go for computer science, it’s going to be a bold journey“, my mind though was “how would you give up on what you planned for since so much” . Decision was made and I took a Bachelor’s degree on CS studies.

Why you should go for it too ?

• You’ll feel like God

You’ll build stuff, you’ll create but in a brave way ! It will make you feel like God, at some point. You will talk to a computer in its own language and make it do what you want it to do. It will make you feel like God, at some point.You will keep on watching and monitoring the things you created, judging how they’re performing and deciding on their destiny whether you have to fix them, shut them down or rebuild them. It will make you feel like God, at some point.

• It changes your character

I meant it builds your character if you don’t have any! It changes it if you already feel like something. Coding makes you a pragmatic even if you’re the most fantasizer of all worlds. You’ll learn how to construct everything in your life. Considering priorities, considering exceptions and testing for failure, pre-planning and asserting every action you take from the smallest daily tasks to your biggest life decisions will be your default behavior after spending time on programming and building software. Computer science is not only about concrete coding, team work will build your character, tasks assignments in teams and the different positions a software engineer could take will implement into your head what time management and stress management are. And talking about time and stress, the One thing you’ll get for sure from a career in CS specially if you’d do programming for a long period is “Patience man, patience” ! You’ll work for so long without seeing the end result, you’ll go through many phases without getting close to a final product and you’ll get code bugs that will hunt you as far as they exist ! And you’ll be patient. And you’ll grow in CS .

•  It’s not only about you

Creation means impact. If you know computer science, then you deliver software that has impact. Such impact could be small, as it could be one that the world needed. Not the world, let’s put aside the casual talk of “making an impact on the world” and “making the world a better place”, you could impact an individual, some person on earth who needed a service and found it through your software. It could be a smile on a child’s face through a game you created or it could be a moral a kid learns through your game. As you can solve complex problems in all and every field. Your actions do matter if you are in computer science.

And.. is it ending ?

The journey started with a three years bachelor’s degree studies on CS, crossed by few internships, and now being followed by an Engineering degree on Computer Science with a specialization on Mobile Information Systems.  As the brave Jobs said on his famous speech at Harvard:  “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”, connecting the dots in my case led to the conclusion and reality that anyone, anywhere, anyhow should at least learn how to code, if not make CS his life.