Cracking The Code
22 Jan 2025
Throughout my life, I have held a close relationship with technology of all kinds. I grew up in California’s Silicon Valley, where the influence of tech companies and computers were ever present. As such, computers were commonly found and used throughout schools, homes, and workplaces. Additionally, my father is a software engineer and my mother holds a similarly technology-centered profession, making tech completely inescapable. Naturally, I would grow to embrace it, and it became present in most aspects of my life. That said, I could only understand most tech, especially computers, at a surface level. I knew how to use them, but unfortunately knew little about how they worked.
Cutting to today, I can safely say I know a lot more. I am studying Data Science, although I reserve an curiosity in all things computer related. Seeing how much I use software in my daily life, from usage in internet browsing, social media, video games, mod development, long-distance communications, among an unspeakable number of other uses, I have a specially vested interest in its development.
When I began coding, I gained an inkling of the idea of how it would be like to be a software engineer. While my projects were mainly small in scale and isolated in terms of usage, I have wondered what kinds of uses they may serve in some real applications (That was a pun).
An Analogy
An analogy to my interests can be found video games. These games are comprised not of a few functions, but of a great number of small functions which work together to form a larger function. These larger functions in turn work in conjunction with others to form some core aspect of the game, such as how it handles interactions or generates graphical representations of events. This tree of functions and how the developers combined them to perform large tasks fascinates me.
From early connections like that, I have developed an interest in planning and designing programs and the combining of numerous, smaller programs to form them. In other words, I am interested in the breaking down of programs into its base parts.
As such, I hope to learn about this process in the future and develop my planning abilities. I also wish to observe the development of such a program, in the hopes that I can personally gleam some insight into exactly how others do it. I may know a lot more than I used to, but there is still much for me to learn.