One year ago, I didn’t know what a while loop was nor a for loop nor an if-else statement. I thought inheritance was something I’d get from my relatives. Classes were what I used to teach. You get the idea. One year ago, I was NOT a programmer.

A lot can happen in one year.

I was accepted into The University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Computer and Information Technology program, designed for people with Bachelor’s degrees in other areas of study. Considering the fact that I hold a B.S. in Photography and a M.A in Secondary English Education, this was the perfect program for me to learn the ins and outs of computer science.

At the end of my first semester, I was able to code in Scala, Java, and C (and assembly language, if you really want to be technical…which I’m sure you do). I declared myself the GUI master after re-creating Frogger using Java Swing. I began adhering to test driven development, laughing as I found my stupid mistakes, cheering as code compiled with no errors, and Valgrind reported no memory leaks.

Flash forward to today. I am nearing the end of my summer internship as a Junior Developer. I’ve completed one major project and one major component of a proof-of-concept project. Because of this, I felt compelled to begin writing about what I’ve experienced and what I’ve learned throughout this adventure into computer science.

Hello world indeed.