When I took an introduction to programming in C class my freshman year of college, that’s when I fell in love with programming. I still remember how excited I was to work on a lab or homework assignment. It may sound silly, but I thought of it as a video game almost. It’s like those games where you build a roller coaster and you can watch it run, I was building parts of a program and I was able to see it run. As a matter of fact, I actually spent an entire day out of my spring break to do the remaining fix or six labs because I couldn’t wait to do them. Of course it was fun.
Since then, I’ve always had a fascination with programming and was able to learn some other languages because I had the fundamentals down. That’s one thing I love about programming, the notion that once you know a programming language, a lot of the syntax and conventions can translate into other languages, making it easier to learn. New programming languages are constantly being researched and developed and so it’s really important to have the fundamentals and core concepts down.
Although I love programming, I really want to go into embedded systems and internet of things devices. Coming from a computer engineering background, it would be cool to design both the hardware and the software components and watch it go together. Micromouse is one project where I’ve designed the hardware as well as the software and it was very rewarding watching the hardware work with the software.