Why I Started Programming

While I was growing up, I always had a fascination with technology and how it worked. One of the things I enjoyed during that time was gaming, and I discovered an online sandbox game. This game allowed you to create and program your own mini-games using the Lua Scripting language. Since I was still in grade school, I never was able to get around to learning the API and building a full on game, but I did learn one thing, the basics of programming! This experience was enough to get my attention in programming for the rest of my life.

When programming concepts all started to click.

During high school, I was given the option to choose from various classes for my electives. Since I already had an interest and a career outlook towards being a software developer, I decided to go with the classes they had on technology and programming. Those classes helped me cement my previous knowledge on programming along with helping me learn the ends and outs of computers and how they function. It also helped me understand important programming concepts such as Object Oriented paradigms and much more.

Swift & The 8-bit Master Game.

After graduating high school, I went full force into learning a programming language on my own. As I owned a few Apple products, I decided to learn Swift. It seemed like the perfect choice since it was a powerful, high level language with a simple, yet familiar syntax. I quickly got the hang of the language and was able to get an understanding of the iOS API. I had a vision of a game I wanted to create. Although I did not have any formal/professional training in the framework, I was very resourceful and I quickly got the hang of SpriteKit. I even created all of the graphics, artwork and even the music for my game, The 8-bit Master. I learned many things along the way, not just about Swift, but about software engineering in general and before I knew it, I had a fully functional and pretty impressive game published on the App Store.

Flatiron School

After completing my game, I realized that I needed to get some professional education in an employable field. After doing a lot of research, I decided on starting a career in full stack web development. I continued to do more research as regards to education and I found Flatiron School. After looking into this school, I decided to apply for enrollment and got accepted. I am very much looking forward to this new opportunity to learn and grow in my programming abilities! So, about the title… Why did I start programming? I guess, just like with any activity, it started out as a fascination during childhood and then grew into something more… a passion.