Design Patterns
18 Jan 2024
Finding the Passion
I already had the idea of wanting to do SOMETHING with a computer going into college, but I wasn’t quite sure specifically what that was yet when I started my first semester. It wasn’t until my second semester when I took a class in Java that I figured out that I really liked programming. The process of putting something together yourself, breaking it, fixing the problem, and eventually getting it working filled me with a sense of satisfaction, and I feel like this is something I could do for the rest of my life. I’m not good with my hands, so I figured that this is the next best thing. After getting my associate’s in software development, I finally decided I specifically wanted to do web development. Web development seems like the perfect choice. It’s a skill in high demand, I get to build stuff, and it’s on my computer.
Is this For Me?
From my research, it seems like JavaScript and React are all the rage nowadays for building web applications. I’ve only had a very brief overview of JavaScript in one of my classes, but we didn’t go very deep into it because we were learning three other languages at the time. I also had never heard of React until very recently, about a year ago as I was scrolling through Youtube videos on the subject. Github also seems like the main platform for collaborating on projects. The only experience I’ve had with Github was downloading Half-Life mods and looking at their source code, but that was about it.
Perhaps…
I’m hoping to delve more into these topics as the semester goes on. Navigating Github was a little overwhelming at first, but it’s actually not too bad. Javascript syntax is already similar to most languages I’ve dabbled in, though ES6 might take some getting used to. I’m mainly excited at the prospect of finally building something that closely resembles a “real-world” project. Since we’re doing modules on freecodecamp, I’ve also signed up for The Odin Project to get a little more experience alongside freecodecamp. I’d have to see how my workload’s going to be like for the rest of the semester though!
Final Remarks
I’ve found something I want to do. The future looks just a little more certain now. Hopefully going to delve much deeper into the actual process of software engineering this semester. More to come.
Note: ChatGPT was used to fix any spelling/grammatical errors.