When I was about 6 years old, a friend of my mothers taught me how to print “Hello World” to the console in C. At the time I thought it was pretty cool, but I didn’t really have the patience to learn a programming language. I really loved playing on the computer we had, but I was more interested in figuring out how to launch Commander Keen from a DOS prompt seeing as I had locked myself out of Windows 3.1 at the time. I didn’t know it at the time, but that early curiosity for computers and making them do what I wanted them to do, would continue to be a part of my life forever.
Looking back on it with a little trip down memory lane, I realize now just how much interaction I have had with various forms of software development over the years. I remember writing my first website in pure html using a text editor, on WebTV no less. A little while later it was still pure raw html, but at least on a desktop pc with notepad. Notepad sucked for a lot of things, especially tables and padding, so in came Dreamweaver (pre-Adobe!) which helped tremendously. Over the next few years I would end up making some money from doing custom Flash websites and animations, figuring out how to setup and online shopping cart and dropship items without ever interacting with a single person, and utilize/setup DCC file servers and bots through IRC to trade anything you could find. I was by no means a genius, but I did develop a fairly high level of computer skills that was just for my own personal enjoyment.
I can’t say I did anything remarkable in my younger days, and throughout my 20’s I was focused on developing another career that for the most part had very little computer interaction, but I always felt comfortable in front of a screen. When I made the choice to change professions and pursue school it wasn’t very hard to go right for computing. The amount of things you can do with computers, and how far they have advanced over the years has always impressed me. Since I have made the decision to dive headfirst into gaining a real understanding of how they work I have only continued to spark my curiosity of knowledge.
Having a background in medicine, I have always had in the back of my mind the question of how I can integrate the two subjects. It wasn’t until I started the hobby of building racing drones and small embedded projects with Arduino and Raspberry PI’s that I began to understand all the various levels of hardware and software interaction. I found that I quite enjoy the fact that there is some thin layer separating machine from code, that someone has to first develop the code to interact with the physical state changes in hardware. I want to pursue this knowledge in computers with an emphasis in medicine.
In the future, I see myself being able to develop and code the pieces responsible for interacting with hardware that is integrated with human beings in need. The code that let someone use their prosthetic arm to receive signals from their body and allowed them to live a more normal life? That’s what I want to do, I want to write that. Does ‘software engineering’ exactly apply to this goal? Not entirely, but I am a firm believer that an understanding of multiple systems and aspects of how they relate can only make a computer scientist/engineer/programmer more capable of achieving what they want to do. I look forward to this journey with an open mind.