Inaugural Post! Or what are you getting yourself into and do you really want to be here?
So here we are. My first official post. I wish I had something epic to write about, like a grand plan to develop an awesome new app or a story about how I’m going to implement a new efficient plan to make work 90% easier. Heck, I’d be happy to have some cool pictures of new tech gear to share. But nope, none of that is going on here today. The only thing I have is a dream.
Years and years ago, when I was a little kid, I was fortunate enough that my parents sent me to a nice little Catholic school. It was on the smallish side, with only about 40 kids in my grade, and less than 300 kids spread across grades K-8. I’ve always been an introvert, so even in a small school I didn’t have many what I would consider good friends. No, instead I would walk to the library about a quarter mile away after school and after finishing my homework I’d immerse myself in a book. My favorite genre you ask? Well I jumped around a lot so I actually didn’t have a favorite as I learned to love all kinds. But I definitely did have a type. A niche type to boot. What is it you ask? Well I thoroughly enjoyed the Choose your own adventure books!
Something about being able to read a book and have several different endings was appealing to me. Oh and I affected which ending I got as well! Years later, when my parents bought me a computer I translated my love for those books into computer gaming. The King’s Quest games were tops on my list as they were the closest that I knew of that were games that involved rich stories like the CYOA books. But I’ll leave the stories of computer games for another post. Sort of. I’ve got another angle for this post and I hope I do get there. I’ll try; I promise.
While growing up, I had a friend who’s dad was a programmer that worked for a bank. He was a cool guy, and loved puzzles. He bought all kinds of puzzles for my friend who in turn would gift me the ones he was done with. I still have a few of them around with me today, including my first rubiks cube! I do love puzzles as well, and maybe I’ll post a few here and there as well. But that love of figuring out these things out are kind of what lead me into my IT career. Being able to stare at a problem for hours without having a clue where to start or even what to do to start is not appealing to most (and sometimes myself as well I’ll admit) but trying to figure out what to do is part of the fun. IT is similar in that sometimes problems are presented to you and you may not have any starting point where you can troubleshoot so you just got a pick something and run with it.
So back to that friend. His dad was a heave COBOL programmer and he would teach us how to code here and there. Mostly to do little functions like adding or subtracting numbers, figuring out percentages for data points (“numbers” for our young minds back then) and other math-y things. I never got into programming professionally, though it had always been something I was interested in doing and over the years I learned enough to be able to read lines of codes in scripts and edit them enough for them to accomplish whatever task I needed done. But I had never actually learned how to program an application from beginning to end. Learning IT stuff took a good chunk of time so outside of the scripting stuff I never really had time to dedicate to the CS craft.
Ok, here we go. I’m going to tie everything together now. Let me know if I did it successfully or not. So with all that said, I have been thinking about things I need to do to make myself more marketable as well as move me forward career-wise. I have a few certs in mind and I’ll share that in later posts. I’m also trying to settle on a degree path for my masters and potentially my PhD which I’ll also share though that’ll be much later; I still have a lot to ponder there.
I have been thinking about the aspects of my career that have potential to move me forward and the one that I’ve been trying to work on is learning how to code in Python. A lot of the common applications that I use at work to verify some of the things that Trellix is telling me exist in Kali Linux, all of them are coded in Python. So aside from getting more proficient with Linux (another topic soon) Python is my latest jam. I have a couple of Udemy courses, couple of books from Amazon, but what I don’t have is a goal. Sure the courses and books have examples of things to learn how to do things but I’m talking about a dream project to affirm the knowledge I’ve acquired. Like woodshop class when you made that crappy bird house, I want to proudly stare at a crappy program I created.
So I’m here to affirm that my goal application is going to be a CYOA story game of my own creation. The story itself will probably be crappy (unless I decide to learn how to write which, hey I might actually do that) but as long as I have a functional story game I’ll call my programming pursuits successful. A second goal will be to create something around a rubiks cube, though that’s more of an ambiguous idea right now. So here we are, the beginning of Gerald’s CYOA thread. LFGGGGGGGG!