OMG that Logo thing brings back so many memories, we played with it too in grade school. 😭 Didn't know what in heaven it was at that time or what in heaven moving the sea turtle 5 units to the left was supposed to mean, but I remember rigging the AUTOEXEC.BAT on the school PCs running Win98 with an infinite loop to brick them... 😅
(Logo is in the LISP fam by the way. Who decided to teach this instead of something like BASIC?? 🤣)
My first program was a number guessing game in QBASIC (first-year high school). Not having the Internet or docs, I never figured out how to generate a random number, so I essentially tried to make a random algorithm myself (a very long but simple stateful math function). I remember having a lot of kids queued up to play with it in our multimedia classroom...
My parents didn't want me to do computer-related stuff and always tried to prevent me from touching a computer. So, I studied Mechanical Engineering at first. Then I dropped out of that program and moved to Germany, and only then finally got brave enough to switch my major to CS. I was 21 when I got started with my current CS program and seriously started to program.
I was doing great at first. One semester in, something happened in life, and I fell into depression. I completely cut myself off with the outside world for about a year, and the people I spoke to the most were cashiers at supermarkets. During that time, however, I realized that JS is not a toy language and started playing with React. At the same time, I also got interested in machine learning, data science, deep learning, all the fancy new stuff, so I started teaching myself everything with conference talks on YouTube and Coursera MOOCs. Although I was always enrolled in an official CS program, I never went to classes and didn't take any exams for almost a year.
I was super lucky to have got a diversity scholarship from GitNation and was able to go to the React Amsterdam conference last year. I almost didn't go because of my anxiety and depression at that time. However, I'm so glad that I went. I met a ton of awesome people there, and made good friends.
That event was a turning point for me and helped me tremendously with my mental health. Since then, I've got much better, and have become a strong believer in facing my fear. Because I was (and am) afraid of meeting people, I started going to meetups; because I was (and am) afraid of public speaking, I signed up meetup talks and submitted proposals to conferences. I'm going to give a lightning talk at React Day Berlin next week. :)
So tl;dr - I'm a CS student but really am self-taught. Also, JavaScript, React and a random stranger's kindness cured my depression. That's how I started 🙃
Thank you for sharing your story! I’m really glad that things are better now - if in the future you’d like to talk to someone, my Twitter DMs are and will always be open 🤗
Best of luck at React Day Berlin, it’s an amazing conference and I’m sure you’ll have a blast! 🥳
Thanks for sharing your story!
OMG that Logo thing brings back so many memories, we played with it too in grade school. 😭 Didn't know what in heaven it was at that time or what in heaven moving the sea turtle 5 units to the left was supposed to mean, but I remember rigging the
AUTOEXEC.BATon the school PCs running Win98 with an infinite loop to brick them... 😅(Logo is in the LISP fam by the way. Who decided to teach this instead of something like BASIC?? 🤣)
My first program was a number guessing game in QBASIC (first-year high school). Not having the Internet or docs, I never figured out how to generate a random number, so I essentially tried to make a random algorithm myself (a very long but simple stateful math function). I remember having a lot of kids queued up to play with it in our multimedia classroom...
My parents didn't want me to do computer-related stuff and always tried to prevent me from touching a computer. So, I studied Mechanical Engineering at first. Then I dropped out of that program and moved to Germany, and only then finally got brave enough to switch my major to CS. I was 21 when I got started with my current CS program and seriously started to program.
I was doing great at first. One semester in, something happened in life, and I fell into depression. I completely cut myself off with the outside world for about a year, and the people I spoke to the most were cashiers at supermarkets. During that time, however, I realized that JS is not a toy language and started playing with React. At the same time, I also got interested in machine learning, data science, deep learning, all the fancy new stuff, so I started teaching myself everything with conference talks on YouTube and Coursera MOOCs. Although I was always enrolled in an official CS program, I never went to classes and didn't take any exams for almost a year.
I was super lucky to have got a diversity scholarship from GitNation and was able to go to the React Amsterdam conference last year. I almost didn't go because of my anxiety and depression at that time. However, I'm so glad that I went. I met a ton of awesome people there, and made good friends.
That event was a turning point for me and helped me tremendously with my mental health. Since then, I've got much better, and have become a strong believer in facing my fear. Because I was (and am) afraid of meeting people, I started going to meetups; because I was (and am) afraid of public speaking, I signed up meetup talks and submitted proposals to conferences. I'm going to give a lightning talk at React Day Berlin next week. :)
So tl;dr - I'm a CS student but really am self-taught. Also, JavaScript, React and a random stranger's kindness cured my depression. That's how I started 🙃
Thank you for sharing your story! I’m really glad that things are better now - if in the future you’d like to talk to someone, my Twitter DMs are and will always be open 🤗
Best of luck at React Day Berlin, it’s an amazing conference and I’m sure you’ll have a blast! 🥳
I wrote a post about speaking that you might find useful: dev.to/tlakomy/what-i-wished-someo...
That post is very informative, thanks a lot! 😃