From Journalism to Javascript
06 Sep 2019
Javascript resembles English much more closely than any other programming language I’ve experienced. Because of this, Javascript and I…just clicked. As someone who has participated in student journalism quite extensively, I have never been happier with a programming language more than I am with Javascript. It just makes sense. Perhaps it’s too early to be saying this, but I’m excited for what the future holds.
How highschool journalism kickstarted my computer science career
Up until this point, I wouldn’t say my computer science journey has exactly been a breeze. I first fell into the rabbit hole that is programming when I was 16 years old. At the time, I was the editor-in-chief of my highschool’s newspaper, the Cougar Connection. I had just created a (very rudimentary) “database” using PHP, mySQL, and HTML/CSS that could organize students by what class they were in. Mind you, we had to deliver newspapers to almost 300 students so this was actually quite useful in cutting down our delivery times. Spurred by that success, I attempted to transfer our print newspaper to the web. So I did what any high school student who wanted to start a website but doesn’t know how to code would do: I started a WordPress website. Now, before you say that’s cheating, I also used HTML/CSS in WAMP to create customized themes, personalizing the default templates to our newspaper. My efforts eventually paid off at the Hawaii High School Journalism Awards where our website was awarded 2nd place in the state out of many other public and private schools’ news websites. Long story short, my experience as a highschool journalist has largely influenced my eagerness to learn more about web development.
The freedom of programming (and writing)
Now that I’m taking ICS314 and have begun learning the basics of Javascript, I feel more inspired than ever to learn how to code. I very much enjoy the athletic software engineering pedagogy of this course. I believe it creates a powerful rewards system (when you master those Rx times) that can easily pinpoint where your strengths and weaknesses lie. So far, my weakness has primarily been my inability to let go of the past. It’s always a struggle not to explicitly declare variable data types (like how you would do so in Java) and simply let the variable be. However, I also believe that to be the beauty of coding. The fact that there are countless ways of achieving the same exact result is what keeps me coming back to programming. I don’t want to be confined to any single way of doing things and as a programmer and a writer, I have the freedom and flexibility not to be.
This truth becomes most apparent during our weekly WODs. I think all of us who have taken or are taking ICS 314 understand that these timed assignments are the most stressful activity in this class. For me, however, this is a stress I have become all but used to during my experience as a student journalist constantly under pressure to meet some very strict deadlines. Writing news articles is pretty much a slightly longer WOD that uses the English language rather than any type of programming. Because I am accustomed to the pressure of having to write and think on my feet, I am able to start WODs with a clear mind, take deep breaths, and remember what a previous professor once told me: “Mistakes always happen because you’re thinking too far ahead; you have to go one step at a time.” Of course, this isn’t verbatim but it’s a good paraphrasing of what I believe to be the most basic (and also most frequent) mistake in software development and it’s advice that has never failed me before.