Being three years into a four year Computer Science degree, it’s pretty apparent I have a passion for coding and working on loads of different projects involving computers. In this post I’m going to try to go back to the start of this fascination, and hopefully get the full story leading up to right now.
From an early age I’ve been obsessed with all things tech. I think it first started when my parents got a swanky new iMac G4, with it’s bold metal arm atop a sleek, hemispherical polycarbonate shell, it caught the attention of anyone to walk into our living room. Every inch of this machine was painstakingly designed, from the feel of every keystroke on the keyboard to the smoothness of the CD drive opening. It was this striking space-age design that inspired me to take up interest in the digital world.
Skipping ahead to secondary school, I studied ICT throughout the five years of compulsory study. This helped expand my knowledge of all aspects of the connected world around us, from video editing and image manipulation, to understanding the fundamentals of the internet and its uses. I came out of Year 11 with an A in ICT overall. A year prior to finishing my GCSEs, I was successful in applying for a week’s work experience with Barclay’s, working at their Radbroke Hall networking infrastructure centre. This was an eye-opening experience, and helped confirm that I was pursuing a career I had a lot of passion for.
In college I began exploring the options available to me as a future Computer Science student. My Sixth Form college didn’t offer any kind of programming or coding courses when I was there (though this has since changed, thankfully), so I took matters into my own hands and learned the basics of programming in my spare time, with the help of Codecademy. With its help, I became familiar with the Javascript programming language. Looking back I think that was one of the best languages I could’ve chosen, as most universities cover Object-Oriented languages such as C# and Javascript in their first years, and so I believed it would be better for me to be familiar with an OO language before beginning my studies. I looked at the University of Liverpool and Swansea University, before ultimately opting for an unconditional offer at the University of Hull. I’ll talk about Hull as a city in another post, but after living here for three years now I have nothing but praise for the area and the lovely people who make it what it is.
In my three years at Hull University, I’ve gone from strength to strength expanding my understanding and knowledge of the impact computers have in all aspects of life. In my first year of study I got to grips with C#, first creating a console applications for word searches, before delving into WPF applications and creating an inventory management system. In addition to the programming side of things, we also covered human-computer interaction and basic software engineering principles, as well as recapping many of the quantitative methods I picked up in the two years I studied maths in college.
Second year proved more challenging, as transferring from C# to C++ was a noticeable step up in complexity. I was again working with word searches, with the difference this year being the additional requirement to create algorithms to solve the puzzles. While I still passed the module, it taught me that perhaps C++ wasn’t what I wanted to work with going forward. Second year was also a time for us to practice Agile development methodology, with groups of five being tasked with creating a theatre booking system. In this module I took up the role of Scrum Master, as well as handling front end development for the application we produced. I rather enjoyed this task, as I’ve rarely been the one in charge of things, so it really gave me quite the confidence boost in a position like that. Second year also had me learning SQL and database logistics, interfacing with microcontrollers like the Arduino, as well as going further into the software engineering principles.
Third year was one of my favourite years at university, and was perhaps the most useful of the three so far. My dissertation project involved using OCR technologies, such as Google’s Tesseract engine, to recover historical code documentation for some of the world’s first computer systems. I really enjoyed this task, as it allowed me to manage much more of my time throughout the year, and progress at a rate I was more comfortable with. As well as the dissertation project, we also covered data mining techniques, and the meticulous nature of its processes. One of the final modules I studied in third year was advanced software engineering, teaching the methodology behind software safety and risk assessment, as well as the structure of software testing. It’s thanks to this course that I now know I want to ultimately end up with a career as a software engineer rather than a developer, as I much prefer the workflow and style of work involved.
So that’s pretty much everything up to present day, I know I’ve written way more than I thought I was going to but once I get going I just can’t stop sometimes…
This post was supposed to be published yesterday but something came up last night, so you’ll get another post later today if you’re lucky.
Baristas & Breakpoints 