Okay, so the title is a little misleading – but I thought it was funny. Plus I couldn’t come up with anything better, even with all of the hours I’ve been putting into CS50. That is to say, I can’t think of anything super important to write about, but I know it’s been too long since my last update and I know that once the words start flowing, I’ll figure it out. It’s been almost a week since my last update (or maybe it has been a week? I probably should have checked before I started writing this). Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that I am here, giving you all (at the time of writing, absolutely nobody) something to read. Err, I’m giving myself something to write – that’s a more positive statement, which is something that can be very lacking in my mind on my darker days. But, I digress.
I’ve been making some good(ish) progress in cs50. I say (ish) because, well, I wish I was making more progress. But I’ve been chipping away at it every day for the last week, so I’m trying. It’s a very intensive course, and as such it’s very informational. I would recommend it to anybody interested in learning a little bit about what goes on inside their computers.
The classes focus for week one has been C, and I spent all of last weekend coding in C in their browser based IDE, debugging a program that I was so close to completing. I’m sure every programmer can relate. I ended up cleaning up the code quite a bit and figuring out everything after a night or two of frustration, but it was the good kind of frustration. I’ve made a couple programs for the course after lesson one of week one. And right after I went straight into lesson two. Just this morning I finished all of the ‘short’ videos after the main course, which means it’s almost time to write a couple more command line ‘programs.’ Just in time for the weekend!
I think this is something that I was meant to do. It’s just… taking a little longer to get into than it should have. But when I was programming as a kid, even through high school, I hadn’t thought of it as a career path. I’m not sure why, the thought just never crossed my mind. Maybe because I wasn’t concerned with finding a career or doing anything with the future, I thought I was just here to exist. I was always too busy working to worry about things like that I guess.
I want to create things and solve problems, maybe problems that people don’t even register as problems because ‘that’s just the way things are done.’ I want to be a part of something bigger than myself. I want to start going to school at some point, but I need money to go to school and money is something that I don’t have at my current occupation. Everything will fall into place though, if I keep nudging it along.
I think that soon-ish I want to start doing some freelance work to kick off my career. So maybe the fastest way to do that would be to learn web development? I have a lot of decisions to make. And I have so much to learn but not enough time to do it fast enough… It will all fall into place though. I’ve got this.