Early Impressions of Tech

Some of my earliest memories of being in kindergarten and first and second grades were the time allotted for playing Oregon Trail on what I remember to be a huge computer that sat in the corner of the classroom. That is when I discovered my love for computers. Other than Oregon Trail I really did not know what they were for or why certain offices had them and others did not.

I could not fully appreciate the technological wonder before me. Fast forward to the late 1990s a friend of the family gifted me an old Tandy 1000. It had no hard drive, just two 5 ¼ inch floppy drives, one of which was for the master disk which ran MS-DOS. I learned some commands and played a whole lot of Tetris on it. Later I got a computer that ran Windows 95, and another that ran Windows XP. I was enrolled in a correspondence high school at that time and I took a graphic design course and a programming class in Visual Basic. After graduating from high school I had no desire to go to college, in fact, I went through a health crisis that rendered me unable to work.

Yet I still felt I was capable of contributing to society in some way so I began my academic career at a local university. My major was CIS or Computer Information Systems. There I learned Java and SQL. At that time I was being pulled in the direction of becoming a psychologist. So I switched majors. I will not go as far as to say that it was a mistake, but I definitely regret not continuing down the path I was on. I did learn a lot about myself and other people in psychology. But once again I felt a pull back towards software engineering.

I was going through all the tutorial sites and watching YouTube videos when I saw an advertisement for my current school. It looked like a great match, and as it turns out it was. I had a few setbacks once I was enrolled, but I did not let it stop me from looking at the bigger picture and continuing with my goals.

What I wish to share here is how the rest of my journey plays out and some of the cool things I have been learning. Hopefully, a bit of humor can be found along the way too. I am in my 5th week of studies and I feel confident in my abilities to finally become a software engineer. Follow me on my journey here.

Was technology your first endeavor? Or did it take a while to arrive on the scene? Share in the comments below.