About

My interest in computer science began when I started my first job out of highschool. Working in Shipping/Receiving at my father's company, I began to see places for increased efficiency all around. From moving to edocuments to increase routing speed or creating digital clones of the warehouse so that anyone in the office could know where anything in the warehouse was without leaving their chair.

So, with no formal instruction or guidance, I began my journey.

The tool I had acces to at the time was Microsoft Excel and so it became my first programing language. For quite a while conditional formatting and cell formulas where how the world operated. Using these tools I created my first couple 'apps'.

The 'no formal instruction or guidance' line is a bit of a misleading statement. I took an Intro to Engineering course in college that had us writing very basic python scripts. So I at least knew what programming was and what it could do. When my googling lead me to discover I could create full blown programs with Excel as the frontend using VBA, my idea of what was possible exploded.

From there I have wandered far and wide, learning more than I could have imagined there was to learn. VBA was my home for quite a while, creating dynamic dashboards and more intuitive data entry methods. At this point I realized that digitally manipulating data was the Holy Grail of intellegent business practice but also that Excel wouldn't cut it anymore. If its going to be effective, it needs to be widely distributed in real time.

Enter web development!

With a little bit of HTML, some CSS, a sql database, and a lot of php (more than I enjoy), I could now present data to people no matter where they were. My earliest project in this sphere was a nearly full fledged ERP system. I still enjoy looking at that one from time to time and might need to dust it off and finish it up, but thats for when I have more time.

After the massive under taking that project was, I started to think about how could I get the most bang for the least buck. The terminal seemed to be the answer. No fancy flares, simply the information i needed in the way I needed it. This was perfect. I dove head first into Linux and have not looked back.

My first project was a CLI for equipment rentals. As I looked around for a language to write it in, python came up but I never really enjoyed the 'indentation as code blocks' style of it. It felt messy and unclear to my. After quite a bit more searching I stumbled upon the beauty of beauties, horror of horrors, C++. Now, naieve my hadn't heard anything about C++ and definitely didn't do any reasearch before diving in head first so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I immediately fell in love though, and despite all the time between now and then, it is still my favorite language.

This brings me to today. Currently, just with the nature of the company I am at and the business world I live in, most of my coding is done in VBA. While it is very close to the bottom of the list for me, I can't deny that it is really okay at what it does. I am still working on a rather large project in C++ whenever I have time, and a couple side projects in Python. I really just want to learn and get my hands on as much as possible.

P.S. I didn't feel like diving into the rabbit hole that has been the LLM and AI world lately but I have had quite a bit of joy learning there as well. That maybe a story for another time.