When I was in eighth grade, I stumbled onto the BotBall Robotics team in my school. Of course at the time, it was only for highschool students but that didn't stop me from being able to sit in to listen and learn for my coming years. Little did I know, there were many, many, more to go. After getting acquainted with our BotBall team and the BotBall mentor, I was able to participate in the team to begin assembling and programming robots! By this point, I had a basic understand about programming in the C language as this is the language used to control the robots, and in the BotBall competition. Throughout highschool, along keeping up with my classes, I would also take part in the BotBall team, coding and debugging. Every Friday, I'd stay after school and try to learn something new.
Along with BotBall, I also developed a passion for video games and their development. I began to create modifications for video games using various programming languages. For example, Minecraft, which uses the Java programming language. Creating modifications for such a game introduces many of the programming concepts you'd learn in college or on the field! Such as making code optimizations, working in a team, using GitHub, and even how tile-maps are implemented to increase performance. Using video games as a sandbox for my programming experiments, enjoyment, and learning gave me the perfect enviroment to become a self-taught programmer before I opened a programming textbook or even set foot in college.
Before getting accepted to the New York City College of Technology (NYCCT), I had developed an above-beginner understanding of programming in a variety of programming languages. Such as C, C#, Java, PHP, and Python. While there was an assortment of softwares and languages we were required to learn, Java and Python were dominant in lessons, courses, and departments within NYCCT. This was incredibly advantageous to me as that's what I knew, and knew very well. After getting settled into trivial CS courses, I went exploring in the CST department within the university. I stumbled upon the CST tutoring program.
I knew the coordinator of the program as they were one my professors at the time and they were aware that I was knowledgeable in the field, or at least above my peers at the time. He explained to me that the program was only for juniors and seniors, and I was only a freshman. I had at least two years to wait. After consistent contact with the coordinator and some communication between the head of the department, I was able to begin tutoring others as a sophomore. As a sophomore, I was working as a CST tutor, helping students much older than me, in higher courses than me, and even material that I didn't have experience in! Just because of my past experience with coding, development, and debugging, I was able to assist majority of the students that I could help. The students I couldn't help directly, I was able to share my experience with solving a problem, looking for another solution, or general debugging. I'm very proud of my work as a CST tutor because being able to help others when I had to learn something the tedious way, is satisfying. Hearing the "ahhh..." from their mouth after explaining something to someone about their code is almost as rewarding as the "wow!" that comes after it.
During the end of my Junior year in college, I had begun applying to various internships who were looking for a student nearing the end of their degree. That was the moment that I spotted the internship position availability over at Sustainable CUNY as a software intern. I applied and was able to interview within two weeks or so. After my interview, I received an email from the person that was conducting the interview congratulating me for getting accepted for the position! I was very happy as I had a very good understanding of various programming languages then. I was able to immediately jump into the environment and begin producing quality code.
Majority of my work so far at this position has been Python, using the Django web framework. Which I am quite proficient in because of my work over at Sustainable CUNY. One project that I had to create using this framework was a web application to parse an excel file and insert the rows into a Postgres database. I was able to do this using my knowledge of programming, and libraries. This project is actually over at the GitHub Repo. I was able to complete this project and many more for my team over at Sustainable CUNY. I truly learned a lot on this job, and continue to learn more everyday.