When I was a kid, I remember being in school and brought into a room and asked a bunch of strange and interesting questions. While I really can’t tell you exactly what the questions were, I must have answered them well. A few weeks later I and about three others in my school were set in a room. The instructor, Mr Gershbach (I honestly don’t recall the spelling, but it was something like that! I was in the second grade after all) said “Today we are going to learn about Computers”. I raised my hand and asked “What’s a Computer”? The other classmates giggled. We learned Pascal, at least I’m pretty sure it was Pascal. This was before computers were widespread, and gasp the Internet didn’t really exist in any accessible form.
I remember Christmas that year, my parents scraped together a bunch of money to buy me my very own Commodore Vic-20! Following some computer programming magazine, I recall carefully typing in thousands of lines of code and showing my dad…a program that didn’t run :(. I didn’t give up and eventually got that game running. Debugging at that time was an extremely painful process!
With respect to my professional career, I kind of floundered around for many years and then eventually went on to pursue dual degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering. Always, and ever present, was some type of device that needed to be told what to do. Sometimes it was LabView, sometimes it was some other language. As I progressed through school, I recall being most fond of the microputer course. We were learning the Motorola HC11. I still have it sitting on a shelf. Amazing what you can do with 256 bytes and how that changes your perception of memory.
Out of school, I was hired at the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory into the Systems and Simulations Division. There, for the next 12 years or so, I worked with multi-fidelity Physics based simulations. This was a very complex system and we were about a team of 20 to 30 people working full time on creating, modifying, evaulating and distributing our system as a training system for Naval personnel, among other goals. While I worked with mostly researching modeled problems, my very favorite part was always writing code and algortihm development. Every chance I got to make something, I did. I even created a full scale type of concept similar to what modern repository systems do, like difference utilities, but for our specific simulation.
After that point, I packed up and moved to Seattle for an opportunity as a Systems Engineer at a Sonar Company. There I was responsible for developing emerging technologies, integrating existing ones and improving anything I could lay my hands on. At one point after our embedded and user interface developers quit, I found myself becoming an expert in their SDK. I even translated their SDK into a Matlab friendly interface. Again, I found every opportunity to write code an exciting and immersive experience.
Sadly that company closed its US facility, but this actually opened a door for me. Moving across the country for a position in a narrow field was a huge and difficult step for me in many ways, and after this event I wasn’t looking forward to start all over again, knowing that after moving again that I might end up in the same position. Because the company moved overseas, I was given the opportunity to retrain under a lesser known program known as the Trade Act, intended for workers exactly in my position. I knew immediately what I wanted to learn more of and began looking at several approaches. When I found out that online courses were possible, I didn’t hesitate to look into Flatiron which was recommeded to me by my fiancé. Learning from my past lessons, I am focusing this time around on refining myself. I aim to emerge polished and fully trained in the course I have set forth in!