To give some background, I have programming experience dating back to when I was 9 years old. However, I was not deep into programming until I was 12, this was when I was part of the Kaimuki Middle School VEX robotics team, RoboVoyagers #4400. My programming experience then extended more when I joined Kalani High School’s Magma Robotics Team 3008. Throughout my time in these robotics teams, I spent a good amount of time both building and well, programming. Alongside participating in robotics, I took the initiative to teach myself the iOS native language, Swift. The reason I attempted to learn Swift was because I was star struck by the trend and boom of the mobile app market. So yes, while I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, my initial desire was through monetary attraction.
Not too long afterwards, I gave up on learning Swift because of imposter syndrome and impatience as a teenager. However, near the end of my senior year of high school, I tried again and began to teach myself web development and programming as a whole. Through the many software engineering and software developing videos I have watched on YouTube, I became very interested in software engineering. The main thing that lured me into this field was the concept of being able to create something that was once not exactly tangible but became tangible through lines of code. To this day, it still amazes me how software engineering can turn nothing, a blank screen, into the beautiful technologies we have now that make life easier.
Coding in general is tedious work, but the end product that you create can make life easy for not just you, but for potentially the world. I think that is what makes software engineering great; the tedious work leads to much more satisfaction. This leads me to the thoughts of hoping I develop greater programming skills and deeper industry experiences. I am aiming to develop better programming skills to be able to sustain the endurance of tedious work and to develop more experience in the tech industry like being able to work with other software engineers to create projects that make people’s lives easier. To put it all together, I look forward to developing my problem-solving skills, behavioral skills, and creative skills.