Tep Dobry Opened My Eyes

31 Aug 2017

My interests in software development began back in the old days…High School! Software has always been magical to me. Back then I had two distinct thoughts on software development: “Boy, how incredible is it that we can tell electrons how to fly around inside a maze in a chip”, and “I wish I could do that”. I didn’t know anyone who could program and I didn’t understand how to begin learning how to program (at least in a way that was fun). Despite knowing very little about hardware or software by high school graduation, I was confident that I would enjoy being able to work with both and that I could see myself working with either as a career. Thus, I came to the University of Hawaii in 2014 with the intentions of graduating with an Electrical Engineering degree.

The Pivot

My first chance to work with hardware and software was surprisingly not from an introductory class; it was from Micromouse! This project was probably the best first experience I could have had. I thought it was perfect, build a mouse that could navigate to the center of a maze autonomously. This idea appealed to me like none of my classes so far had. I would be able to walk away from this project with a tangible thing that I could point to and say “mine!”. The project also showed me what I could do with what I would learn. This differed from the courses I was taking at the time, where I had no idea if what I was learning would be exercised in the future.

Anyways, Micromouse gave me real and powerful motivation to learn about software engineering, as well as insights in to what my education could be applied towards. Thank you Tep Dobry!

Hopes For The Future

A lot has changed since Micromouse. I have since changed to the Computer Engineering program. I am slowly but surely moving out of the software development “impostor syndrome” that I’m sure all of us have felt at some time. I believe that I have gotten much better at learning. I have many goals for the near future, so I suppose I’ll drop them here in a list.