Hello World. Here is Switch.
Today, I would like to tell you how I discover the IT world, and how I evolve into it until now.
This story begins when I was quite young (but also quite old for some).
First steps
I think that, at my time, they where two kind of thing in IT which young ones would like to discover. Either you wished to create a video game, either you wished to build you own website to share some of your life, project and other.
I was in secondary school when I first tried to build a website. Nothing great, I used a free solution to help me code using an editor like feature (as wordpress but offline), witch was called Nvu (later Kompozer).
I progressed by trial and error, checking on the internet what funny things I could try to build, or trying to find a way to display something I would like to. Step by step, I graduated for the editing vue to use mainly the coding part. Then I switched to true code editor (Coda was free at the time on Mac OS, then I evolved to Netscape and Sublime witch will be one of my main editors before VSCode and JetBrains suites).
Even though it was quite simple websites, and a lot of programmers would troll by saying pure HTML+CSS is not true programmation, it still build good base for my future growth. I already learned how to use existing resources, building your own from them. Also, learning how to build step by step a full project is quite a good foundation as you will then have a better understanding of tools creating them for you.
Algorithms discovery
The next step started in high school. A new world open to me using a calculator as bases. I don’t know for other country but in France, when you arrive in high school, you had to buy a complex calculator providing feature like graph representation and analysis, equation solving and, most important for me, a programmable one.
The langage was quite simple but it had all the bases of any imperative langage:
- simple loop
- variable declaration
- assertions
So I started to implement the mathematical algorithms I learned, such as euclidian division, 2d degree equation solving, and so on. Through this process I cleaned most of beginners mistakes and learned to fell something was missing as I could not freely reuse existing programs in another one. I had to build each programs as an individual block. So I cleaned most of my inputs and outputs to easily chains programs when calling them and self discipline myself to reduce the possible entries. Also, I like to check a lot from the user entry. There are two way to manage them when providing function to safe entry (internal to company usage only by devs for example). You can assume that any one calling the function as to know how it should be called, then if an entry is invalid, it becomes the user fault as he/she did not correctly called the method. Or you can secure each called by checking any entry and ensuring it matched expected conditions. I like the second method more as I learned programming using langage who did not allow comments and did not provide on the fly documentation for methods while coding. Also, it ensures that the method can be called by any end user without the need to build a new security couch.
Learning in school
I decided to follow programming classes after high school. I entered preparatory classes to prepare for mathematics and physics colleges with competitive entrance examinations and choose computer science as a minor.
It was my first contact with a form a paradigm I still love, witch is functional programming. Learning it allowed me to clarify and widen my vision when building tools. A lot of methods to simplify problems, divide them, link them with mathematical theory was presented to me during those years. And it made me choose to become a Computer Science engineer.
Engineering college then allowed me to discipline myself and stop doing every thing from scratch one you have tried it once. This was reinforce by my first professional experiences.
Now, I reached at lot of domains in IT through all my learning phases and professional experiences and I can describe myself as a Backend developper (people building the behind of the scene to ensure an application works correctly). I love devops and artificial intelligence, and I am following and learning a lot of influencer and researching in those subject.
Hope it was nice to read, and Happy New Year 🙂
