Origin Story
I’ve come to hate my own creation, now I know how God feels.
-HJS
My dad owned a cybercafé back when we lived in Haiti and often times there would be different machines (typewriters, computers, printers, etc.) transiting through the house.
I was always curious about the cold and silent creatures; trying to read English labels I didn’t understand, wondering how any person could operate so many buttons with only…1...2…3...10 fingers.
Since the city of Port-au-Prince’s electrical grid didn’t provide much more than two-hours of current per-day (if any) and I wasn’t growing any more fingers, my curiosity remained unsatisfied.
Fast-forward several-thousand days, several-thousand miles, and still only…2…4...10 fingers.
<html>
<header>…
Thanks to some coaching from Ms. Mavis Beacon I learned that ten-fingers was enough to get started. My first foray into coding revolved around web development. I wanted to share fan-art and back then (think “Geocities” and the title “Webmaster”) that meant you had to learn how to code…
I didn’t really think much of the thing. Coding that is. An HTML page was just a text file instructing the browser what to draw.
</html>
View Source
In a way I’ve been doing open-source development since day-one. Everything was readable in the HTML source code. If I saw a fancy layout or interesting effect on someone’s website understanding was only a click away.
document.wtf(Y2K)
Yahoo!: What does “Y2K” stand for?
I believe Y2K was the definitive moment when I understood programming was a thing. While every-one was raving about how the Computer Apocalypse was coming no-one could quite explain Why. After an anti-climatic Year-2000 rolled-in I quickly discovered…to put it in over-simplified language…all the fuss was because some programmers were too lazy to use four-digit years in their code which meant arithmetic involving two-digit dates would become unstable once you go beyond ‘99’.
That sounded like the kind of mistake I could make.
I want to be a programmer when I grow up!
Although I had been doing basic web development for some time I never considered any of it programming because I found JavaScript…meh.
A Real Programming $Language
Visiting my local library, I browsed the “Computer” section and picked up the first shinny pearl I noticed.
I’m not quite sure Why Perl.
I recall the “For Dummies” part sounding appropriate but I’m not sure what else ultimately factored into choosing that language over the other languages available.
In any case, I’d like to say that’s where it all started for me.
System.out.println(…
Perl was just the beginning. Over the years I’d pick up one programming language after another until now, coincidentally, circling back to JavaScript[ish].
…)
Ax = E[Z] = E[vT]
Maths is the other thing that has been constantly in the background throughout my life.
After graduating with a double-major in Mathematical Decision Sciences (aka Statistics and Operations Research) and Calculator Science I opted to follow-through with programming as a career given my more concrete experience in the field. With the emergence of Machine Learning and by virtue of the tools I’m developing I plan on getting more familiar with Python and data analysis architectures over the coming years.
