Soup to Nuts
23 Jan 2020
The Wonder Years
My story in Computer Science began over 30 years ago. I wrote my first program in elementary school back in the mid-80’s where I attended public school in Mountain View, California. Similar to kids today, I grew up playing video games. The difference was that to play a game back then usually required some knowledge of DOS, and a slew of floppy disks. Whenever someone’s family purchased a new computer, we would gather at that friend’s house for months until the next upgrade came out. I remember rushing over to play Ultima on my friend’s new i486 and getting a kick out of how fast the character darted across the screen. We had to underclock to be able to play. My character seemed so slow after that. Looking back, I would have expected myself to become a life-long computer geek, but after many twists and turns, I ultimately ended up in the military.
Air & Space Force
Jumping forward to today, I recently bid farewell to the military after over two decades of service. The decision to retire was quite simple. I wanted to do more with my life and the opportunity to retire at 20 years was too good to pass up. If you are in the military and unsure about when to retire, I recommend this blog post by Tim Kane. Like many others, I progressed quickly through the ranks but after reaching the peak in my field, there was not much else to do. I never deployed, only fired a weapon once during basic training, and moved just a few times throughout my entire career, usually to a new house not far from the old one.
Don’t get me wrong, my job was awesome, but the reality check for me came as I was being groomed for “senior leadership” positions. I took the required classes and mingled with the appropriate people, but I did not want to end up spending some of my best years playing Volleyball (yes, it does happen). No offense to those of you who excel at that sort of thing, but to me it seemed like getting stuck in a poorly coded for-loop. You might be there by accident, and you might be there for a while, and if you did manage to escape, you might not get what you wanted out of it. Ironically, I joined the Air Force thinking it might break off into the Space Force. Now that I am gone, we are about to finally have a Space Force! Ha.
Joint Staff
Instead of Volleyball and Paddle boarding, I chose to retire and decided to try something new. Shortly after departing the military I received a random job offer to work as a liaison officer with the Pentagon. In my interview, I explained that I did not have even the most basic requirements for the job but somehow the employer and government were both convinced I would be a perfect fit. I accepted the challenge and sure enough, they were right. I found myself loving the new job, no longer worried about being the best, and I quickly discovered working with the “senior leaders” I had avoided for so long was somewhat enlightening and rewarding. I had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest military and civilian minds. It may come as a surprise to some, but the Department of Defense (and all the 3- and 4-letter affiliated agencies) is filled with talented people, regardless of who’s in charge at the White House. They even have a great website with training on just about everything you would ever need to do the jobs.
While my time in the military and my follow-on work did not directly relate to Computer Science, I still managed to make a hobby of at least keeping up with technology. I also taught myself PHP and MySQL and challenged myself to explore ways to get creative with technology at work. Ultimately, my position moved to D.C. and I did not want to leave Hawaii just yet.
Back to School!
Lucky for me, last year the VA graciously provided me with an opportunity to pursue a second degree in Computer Science at UH Manoa. As I enter my second year, I am getting close to finishing the mandatory courses needed to stretch my wings. Each class has been amazing thus far and I hope one day I can contribute back to the community. Personally, I am interested in Natural Language Processing and anything related to Data Science. Last semester, I took a Machine Learning class where we implemented some supervised and unsupervised learning models (KNN, k-Means, etc.) and we also had a brief introduction into Neural Networks.
In the past year, I learned Assembly (x86), Java, Python (w/ numpy, pandas, sklearn, etc.), and R. This year kicked off focusing on C, C++, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and MATLAB for Linear Algebra, but I will probably devote some extra effort to strengthening the other languages as well.
Why am I interested in Software Engineering? The feeling I get after watching this video probably sums up my thoughts better than words.
Let’s make the world a better place, one line of code at a time. (I swear I did not rip that off, but I just checked and someone from freeCodeCamp has used a similar quote already!)
By the way, not sure if anyone noticed but I have been practicing adding hyperlinks. I may have gotten a bit carried away.
Thank you for your patience.