Ashton George

Jan 25, 2023

My Programming Experience as of January 2023

Good afternoon, I am writing this post at 11:03 PM on January 24th, 2023. I am nearing the conclusion of the development of this site and wanted to write an all-encompassing article before I decide to host it. In this article I will discuss my complete programming journey up until this point, which will include a few different things.

To start small, I began with Scratch in Mr. Schrocks "Coding: Puzzles and Games" class at Bedford High School. After tinkering with the building blocks (conditionals and loops), I started to realize that I wanted to move on to the next step, an actual programming language. However, rather than jump right into a language, Mr. Schrock led us through a visual coding game. This game, called Jeroo, involved writing a program by calling a series of preset functions to move the character across a random landscape. It was very primitive, but it introduced me and my class to the concept of Functional Programming.

Fortunately for me, my hunger to learn an actual programming language was satiated soon after. After messing around with the Jeroo game, we moved on to the basics of Python 3. Mr. Schrock covered almost every base that every language shares; we learned about for loops, while loops, if statements, else statements, data types, console logging, and debugging. We even learned about some basic imported libraries like random, and even some complex ones like Pygame. We started out following some Pygame book guides, then modifying the games to meet a set of instructional requirements. After that, we started writing text based games in Python, where I wrote a choose-your-own-adventure-style game.

The next school year, we began to learn about Swift and SwiftUI, Apple's programming language and UI framework. We also learned to integrate SDK's like FirebaseSwift and FirestoreDatabase. On our way out of high school, my childhood friend Isaac and I began to spearhead projects on our own. These projects took technical knowledge that Mr. Schrock hadn't instructed us on. It was purely our own playground to use the tools we have learned over the years in his classes. These projects were very fun and informative, but I began to get sick of the cookie-cutter UI styling and markup after some time.

That leads to my graduation from high school in May of 2022. Now that I was out of school and had to wait all summer to get back into what I enjoyed, I realized that I didn't want to stop just because I passed the classes. This led me to purchasing a Codecademy subscription to continue challenging myself over the summer. With Codecademy, I decided that I would take the path of a web developer. I was especially enticed to start web development because I wanted to fully spread my wings with UI development. I also would have the capability of using backend tools to create web apps (you're looking at one right now). So, naturally, I started my journey once again in a place relatively small. Javascript.

After some basic research about web development, I gathered that there was something of a triad to web development. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I figured I would start at the scripting language (JavaScript) to determine whether I would enjoy programming with it, since HTML and CSS are really just markup and style sheet languages. Turns out, JavaScript really isn't that different to Python. JavaScript does a little less assuming when it comes to indentation and whitespace, and it also uses brackets. Thankfully, my background in Python made JavaScript easy to pick up and hit the ground running with. I completed the beginner and intermediate level JS courses on Codecademy and felt somewhat prepared on the scripting front.

After JavaScript came HTML and CSS. Thankfully, both took me 1-2 weeks to get familiar enough with to use. If you are reading this and are new to programming, take this from me if nothing else, you will learn to program better by actually programming rather than reading books or taking online classes. Build projects. Thankfully I didn't need a full 100% understanding of HTML and CSS to get started (knowing how to write HTML div's and CSS classes was enough to get started for me).

Now, as of winter 2022 into 2023, I have learned a few different things. JavaScript frameworks like React, SvelteKit, and NextJS are where I started out. CSS frameworks like Sass and Tailwind streamline the styling process ten-fold. Now that we are in the present and I don't have much left to talk about in the past, I will say that I am uncertain where my future in web development will take me. I could also say the same for Computer Science. However, what I can say with certainty is that I am at the most driven point in my life, and I am committed to lifelong learning in this field. If there's anything you'd like me to go over more in depth, leave a comment or reach out to me personally. Thank you for reading, have a good day.