My Coding Journey

Many of you know that I spend a decent amount of my time coding. So, let me tell you a little bit about my journey. Quite frankly, it was hard to enjoy coding; I’m not exactly sure why I started liking it at some point, but I think it became more appealing once I got better at it.

My first experience with coding was in 5th grade, and it was with HTML. I know it's not a programming language, but I will mention it. One of my friends was learning HTML at the time, and this one time in class, he showed me something that caught my attention for some time: a button. I know, fascinating. It definitely was at the time. Later on, he used Javascript to alert the user to a message after clicking the button. Now I was certain that I wanted to learn this sorcery. So, I went home and asked my dad to teach me HTML. I was heavily involved for a couple of months, spending time learning HTML instead of doing my homework. My enthusiasm persisted for the remainder of 5th grade, but I quit once summer vacation started.

I didn’t code until 7th grade, and that’s when my desire to program reappeared. This time, I moved on to a language that I still use frequently to this day: Python. I went to a summer class that taught Python, and that’s where I was introduced to libraries like Turtle (basic graphic design) and the Raspberry Pi. Turtle graphics is a practically unused library, but it was appealing enough to draw the attention of a 12-year-old boy. The library basically allowed for the manipulation of a “turtle” to draw designs. For about a week, I created various designs by implementing loops and conditional statements. I later discovered that I could make 2D games using turtle graphics, and that’s how I made my first programming game. I made my own version of Pong. This is also around the time I learned that to be a successful programmer, you have to be excellent at googling. Thank God for Stack Overflow.

Despite my interest, I left programming once again. I took a programming class (taught in C++) my freshman year of high school, but I didn’t learn anything fundamentally new, so I slept my way through the class.

Towards the end of freshman year, Quarantine began, and that’s when I also started to code consistently. I started coding in Python again and taught myself new libraries like Pygame and Tkinter. These libraries are practically never used, so I knew that I needed to shift my focus if I wanted to be successful. Thus, began the data science/ machine learning phase. Luckily, Python was the most popular language for data scientists, so I taught myself the necessary libraries: Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Tensorflow, Scikit Learn, etc. This was the real deal. I knew that having this type of skill set would make me successful in practically any field. Almost every technical job requires prediction and classification in some way and machine learning is at the essence of both. I also taught myself some Computer Vision along the way and Java (for android app development).

For now, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the focus of my coding projects (I’m sure this will continue since this is the longest I’ve coded without quitting). Coding is frustrating. Yet, it’s also fascinating. I’m not certain if software development/data science will be my career choice, but I’m sure that everything I’ve done up to this point has aided me in some way. In the end, if you do plan on coding, try to be more patient than me.