I had medium for awhile, but I never really found a topic that I could write about. I was going to write about video games, but my interest mostly diminished. My true passion is in programming and software technologies.
It started when I was half way through college. I was really uncertain of what I wanted to do professionally. I honestly thought I was going to be a medical doctor. My friends through out high school were really into biology and chemistry. Subconsciously that planted an idea into my head like in Inception. Or at least it felt that way. When I started college at Pitt, I focused on taking biology and chemistry courses on the pre medical track. I was thinking of majoring in neuroscience at the time. My roommate in freshman year helped me a lot by questioning my desire for becoming a doctor. And … I had no good answer for him. I realized my answers were superficial, like “helping others” or “making money”. But those answers can be applied to any other job. I decided to shadow other doctors to see if it was something I liked. The first and last doctor I shadowed worked at UPMC and the work looked kind of boring, just one patient after another, complaining about their problems. My breaking point was in my sophomore year of college in the first week or two in Organic Chemistry. I realized this was just boring and I had to change my path.
I looked through the other courses offered at Pitt and I noticed some introductory classes on computer science. I was always curious about computer science. I wanted to take some in high school but I didn’t have enough room in my schedule. So, I took a leap of faith and withdrew half of my courses to take some computer science classes. This was probably the third best decision in my life. First — accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and second — marrying the love of my life.
My goal in college was to finish with the rest of my friends on time (2 years left), so that meant taking a huge load of cs courses and summer classes. It was definitely a stressful time during finals in my junior and senior year. Multiple final exams and final projects are a BAD combination. So don’t be like me and find out what you want to do college ASAP. I was enjoying my cs courses so far, but I didn’t really understand what coding was like in industry. I spent my summer before senior year at an internship at Teletracking. The company specializes in optimizing patient flow within a hospital. You can read more about the company here. It was really hard for the first few weeks, the project I was on was using the .NET framework and AngularJS (1.X). I only learned Java and some C at Pitt, so I had to catch up on .NET, C#, AngularJS, and JavaScript. I focused on AngularJS and JavaScript since, I was working on creating on a real-time communication framework with SignalR. One of my best achievements was teaching myself JavaScript, AngularJS, and SignalR.
Fast-forward to the end of my senior year at Pitt, and I accepted an offer at GD! Getting an internship is highly recommended. Getting a taste of industry helped me determine whether I like it or not and it improved my chances of getting a job.
I’m been working at GD for about 3 years and the biggest thing I learned was React, Redux, and Typescript. In my future posts, I will be treating medium as a personal dev blog. I’m currently working on a desktop budget application using React, Redux, TypeScript, and Electron. Here is a sneak peek:
