I'm happy with the direction my life is taking. This blog started in April and was designed to monitor my progress along pursuing a career in software development. I have expressed on this blog how my path has changed from when I first started college. All of this comes from my passion to not just settle with a high level overview of how this digital world works, but an in depth study into how people are building the new world we live in. Tinkering, hacking, researching, and ultimately a commitment to learn to do it myself. I knew the difference between Information Technology in practice and Computer Science when I first started. I began studying for certifications and working as a computer technician knowing that I wanted to work with these systems and was content with being the IT guy. Let the engineers and Computer Scientist design the systems .. I just wanted to play with them. Juxtaposed in relation to a mechanic and mechanical engineer. Then the shift I described began to take place and I wanted to know deeper, play harder, and study longer. Tinkering with websites and watching YouTube videos began to be more commonplace until the day on April 12th when I said I wasn't going to be scared to dig deeper anymore and I wanted to learn how these systems that I love playing with so much, were constructed. Since then programming is something I have been ever fascinated with and my technological paradigm regarding my career and academia, shifted. I spend most of my time with web development and have openly stated that this is the area in which I want to delve. Knowing the innards of the HTTP protocol, Java, .NET, Javascript, responsive web sites, rich web applications, etc., I still want to be a back end web developer and create web services, work with the database, and spend grueling hours making sure users have pretty data to look at. But again .. I find myself on a quest for more. I pick up my cell phone and can no longer use it as a regular user but am thinking about activies firing off requests to Amazon Web Services and what type of negotiation is happening on the service layer ultimately delivering my YouTube video safe and sound. I want to know how my cell phone works ... so I built an Android application. I want to know how my computer works so I looked into the history of Windows development .. I think this is contagious and hopefully 21st century educators are doing more to incite this type of thinking. Well .. I'm a Linux guy now. Love Linux to death. Thinking of completely replacing my host systems at home with Ubuntu and developing full time as a command line hacker. Hell, I may even buy a MacBook and get some square frame glasses!
I digress ... (I do that a lot)
Linux is not just an operating system but the most successful open source software project known to mankind. With over 15 million lines of production code, 2,000 developers, and over 100 different distributions .. Linux has changed the world in which we live. Remember, up until recently I thought the world ran on Microsoft. So yes, I'm still giddy about this open world I am now aware of.
I don't want to change tracks or throw another set of books on my desk that I'll never read but this is something else I'd like to view from the inside out. Systems programming has been something I always said I wanted a taste of regardless of being a web developer or not. Increased use of mathematics and algorithms, operating system design, computer engineering, C and machine code is a world all its own. But the operating system is the fundamental building block of everything we produce. After all, web applications are also hosted on a system which provides a public end point for the public to access its resources. I don't think there would be anything wrong with learning some systems programming and Operating systems concepts. I think it would actually be beneficial. Studying how the computer works at its most primitive level could only produce promising results in my current work, it is something quite fun and interesting, and I'm going to be more or less exposed to and expected to know if I'm going to grab a graduate degree in Computer Science. I'd like to know more about this lower level world. Cutting through layers of abstraction and getting more intricately involved with technology should be quite exciting. So I'm not going to completely distract myself with my career goals but I have picked up an online course and a few textbooks and am going to learn a bit of new information. I'd like to learn how the code I write today works its way down to the lowest level of hardware and instruction and executes what I tell it to. I always said that at some point I would learn C. Being a younger developer in the new age, C isn't the first language we're exposed to anymore. Learning C and understanding where these newer technologies got their quirks from should help me in every aspect of computer programming and development. So I'll keep updating the blog with what I'm learning of that.
Well, I still have a good bit of my lunch break left. Time to go fire up a terminal and learn how machines work!
Happy Coding. Happy Learning. Happy Living.
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