Hello world! This is the first statement that almost every programmer is introduced to when they write their first program.
This was introduced first in a book called “The C Programming Language”. To this date it’s used as the basic program to start off anyone who interest themselves in programming.
I started off in the same manner - writing a program to print Hello World!. I started off my journey in programming in Java. Yep! Despite what everyone else starts off with,
I started off with Java. I grew a passion for programming when I was in grade 6 and wrote my first program then. I never really cared about programming or computer science in general to be honest.
Most of my passion is towards mathematics and still is today. I used to play a lot of PC games when I was young and one day I got bored. Bored to the point that I didn’t want to play anymore games.
Then I thought to myself that what if I made my own game and played it?
Hence I started to ponder over the possibilities as to how I could achieve such. As I was a noob and didn’t know anything about programming, I thought to myself: Can I make a game in PowerPoint?
And so began my adventure of making my game in PowerPoint. The “game” that I made had the objective of moving your cursor through a series of maze paths while avoiding obstacles. At the end of the path you click a button to move on to the next level. After 4 hours of fighting with PowerPoint and battling a “pre-carpal tunnel syndrome” I managed to make 3 levels. I made use of animations and on-hover states work around the game mechanics. I felt quite accomplished that day and even showed that game to my family members and a family friend aunt. And hence began my adventures into such field of computer science.
When I quickly realized the limitations of the software I used, I began to research as to how games are actually made. Enter the world of programming and programming languages. I quickly learnt that C++ was widely used to make some piece of software called a game engine and then a game engine is used to make the actual game itself.
Little did I know, I ended up in a recursion algorithm that hasn’t returned to the base case as of today. I started researching what a programming language is and how to make a simple program.
I started asking the questions of “what?” and “how?”. Fast forward 6 months and I had learnt the basics of Java. I tried out C++ in the middle but it never really worked out for me. There’s just something about
Java that just attracted me towards it. Talk about the irony of a programmer falling in love with coffee (if you get what I mean). I had already started making complex java projects that involved GUI and other forms of
complex logic. By the time I was in grade 7, I had made my very own basic (and when I mean basic, I mean very basic) database management software in java. It looked kind of ok but you could tell this was done by a newbie.
When I came to grade 8, I bought my first ever programming text book called “C Programming Absolute Beginner’s Guide” by Greg Perry and Dean Miller. I have to say: an excellent book indeed. It really coers the basics of C programming very well and a program at the end of the book about making a poker game (console based of course). After reading the book, I switched to C as my primary language for coding. Little did I know that C was not object oriented and hence I ran into my first set of obstacles. As time moved on, I slowly began to start using Java again and I fell in Love with it again. Slowly as I built up my experience, I started started grasping nuances within my ability in coding and started challenging myself to harder and harder tasks. I started doing my own projects just to increase my experience.
Fast forward to today and I’m able to code well in Java, Python, C and Javascript. There’s still room for improvement but I’m versed well enough to make an Intermediate to Hard level project.
At the time of writing this biography, I’m in 2nd year of Computer Science course in the University of Botswana and I’m looking forward to doing more and more projects with my friends. I guess that’s all for today.