WAY, WAY BACK:

I was around ten years old when my family had bought our first computer in the 90’s. It was a bulky Gateway Desktop computer, and none of my parents knew how to use one. This was the during the dawn of the “American Online” Age when dial-up internet was considered high-tech. “High-tech” to ten-year-old me meant hoping our internet connection would make it past step two without a series of problems.

Troubleshooting became my responsibility in the house. Between needing to reformat the computer because of a million different “blue screen of deaths,” I had memorized the steps that IT specialists helped walk little-me through over the phone.

I loved everything about the computer, but to be honest, the keyboard was my favorite. The keyboard was my magic wand to creating anything I wanted, and I became obsessed with typing faster and faster, until I could memorize where each letter was and type without looking down.

Shortly after, the social media platform “Xanga” became popular. For the young folks in the back, Xanga was essentially the first social media blogging platform that became popular amongst us former millennials during our elementary and middle school years. I had become obsessed with the ability to view source code / HTML on other people’s websites and “steal” their layouts, themes, and attributes for my own Xanga. This was commonality amongst the community. Little did we (or my parents) know that through building our Xanga, we were learning basic web design skills.

Then, The Matrix came out, and we all know what that did; you would have definitely found adolescent-me changing her font style to the iconic black and lime green in the Courier New font face as I typed to my friends on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Other movies such as Antitrust and The Italian Job were my favorites, specifically the characters and plot points focused on technology and the mysterious language that computers spoke. I so badly wanted to be that nerd who knew how to type just the right combination of symbols and words that made the computer do something cool.

But the farthest I had gotten as a child was to run a line in command prompt during an in-depth troubleshooting session. Back then, I thought that the field of computers was only for the super smart people (and, subconsciously, male) could learn. I thought that only people who were naturally good at Math and Science could learn this subject. I never thought that an art-loving sensitive girl like me could learn something that seemed so complex.

PRINT(“HELLO WORLD”)

For years, I just used computers for what I needed them for the most: to write my college essays, book drafts, or business e-mails. When I finally got to working in “the real world” after college, I had begun to use Excel more and more for my daily duties. The more I worked with Excel, the more old math classes of logic and “if / then” statements came flooding back into my memory. After learning how to use a “V Lookup” in Excel, seeing how much time was saved and how satisfying using that function was, I began to research computer programming. Through some digging, I ended up learning about the programming language Python.

I tend to get a little eager and excited when learning new things, so I had spent probably around an hour or two reading some basics about Python before actually diving into writing my own program. I already knew what I wanted to create: a basic “yes” or “no” quiz that would help the user identify a jewelry material. (I was working on this as some extra credit for my job. I had already outlined an entire “map” that worked as a visual of if / then statements).

After hours of tedious tweaking, I finally had a short program that was running and returning the right values. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t contain myself. As a creative writer, having the switch from subjectivity to objectivity was very satisfying. For years I had spent hundred of hours questioning my own personal novel writing, and the subjectivity of art was beginning to impede my mental sanity.

What was even more amazing to me about writing and running lines of code in Python was that if you did make a mistake, you would be told exactly where and what error occurred. This level of exactitude became incredibly refreshing and enthralling.

DEEP DIVING (NOT DEEP LEARNING, NOT YET, LET ME GET THERE…)

Due to my current lifestyle circumstances of graduate school, freelancing, motherhood, and having relocated from New York City to Florida, I have been presented with the opportunity to learn a new skill. I’ve chosen programming. So far, I have been learning the programming language of Python through the courses and lessons offered on Team Treehouse, Udemy, Mimo, Youtube, and various books which I will be talking more about here on this blog.

It is my goal to learn as much as I can about this subject, as efficiently as I can, so that I will become a great asset to a future team in the programming field. As I’ve already begun on this learning journey, I realized that I had few outlets to share this experience with. Therefore, I will like to use this platform as a tool to document and share my programming journey and future projects.