The Beginning

On January 1st 2023, I decided it was time to learn how to code. The goal was to get a foundation on programming and possibly find something I love within that. I always thought of this as the revival of my coding passion. When I was around 15, I was certain that I wanted to be a software engineer. I thought nothing could change my mind, until of course something did. I went into product design and engineering but I guess some part of me still wanted to be able to code - at least at the basic level.

David Malan, the teacher of CS50, immediately drew me in to the world of computer science - I absolutely loved the course, the teaching, and the problem tasks! It was the best teaching I had experienced, and it was all online! I took the course alongside my internship at a product design consultancy, where I coincidently had a few coding projects. I suddenly realised how valuable coding was within engineering - I found myself trying to automate everything!

CS50 had a main focus on the fundamentals of computer science, from hardware, to software, and to the logical flows of thinking when writing a script. This was all great, but the subject that really interested me was Web Programming which was touched on briefly at the end of the course. I was immediately fascinated. It was a tool to making anything you wanted on the web. The scope was so infinite - you could make anything! My mind went crazy thinking of all the things I could do. I think I loved it because the web development process had one similar to product design - one of my true passions.

It was at this point that I realised that I had grown up using the internet and the web, but I knew nothing of how it worked. I wanted to learn a bit more about this topic, so I chose a web application as my final project for the CS50 course.