Experimenting with new languages is a thrilling experience. Today, I dived into Ruby and Jekyll, the technology that is used to create this page. There is something extremely elegant about Ruby. I began doing the ruby koans, a collection of tests that teach you about the ruby language and offer satisfying feedback as you progress. I then worked my way through jekyll’s step by step tutorial and ultimately created this site.

I intend this to be a personal blog documenting my web development and computer science journey. I am at the early stages right now. I took my first Computer Science class, Intro to Object Oriented Programming, at community college, way back in 2011, but fell off soon after. While I really enjoyed that class, and I think I was rather a natural, the field of computer science as a whole intimidated me, and I didn’t think I could cut it as a full-fledged programmer. At that time, I had declared “Web Design” as my major.

Unfortunately, back in 2011, at the community college, the Web Design program was sorely lacking. Despite the advent of HTML5, professors were still teaching HTML4 and using old tools like Dreamweaver. I was put off from it, and dropped out for a few years. I focused on my job at a local liquor store, which was hugely satisfying and deserves its’ own post some day, but the store eventually went under. For a few years, I worked construction and furniture moving.

Around 2018, old injuries were catching up to me and physical labor was getting more difficult. I was also sitting on education benefits I had acquired from military service that had an expiration date. So I decided to go back to school. I declared Paralegal Studies as my major, intending to take it all the way to law school. But for my last semester of my Associate’s, in Spring of 2020, I took Java Programming with a great professor, before I got my Associate’s in Paralegal Studies with High Honors.

I loved Java. I went overboard. The professor offered a lot of space to go crazy. Here’s my midterm project. It’s a sort of art program, where you move triangles around to make interesting designs, and can save them as textfiles. Yea, it’s pretty ugly, but I managed to program the whole thing in Notepad++ with virtually no programming experience before that course, so I’m proud of it nonetheless. So I changed directions and began pursuing Computer Science. In about a week, I will be beginning my Bachelor’s. In the meanwhile, I am consuming as much as possible. This week, I completed many hours at freecodecamp.org and started this blog. I am thrilled at the prospect of working in a field that allows me to code. It feels as though the whole world is my oyster.

This blog will serve as a record of my progress. I hope I will be able to elucidate pitfalls aspiring developers such as myself encounter, as well as methods I find to overcome them. May you enjoy reading.