Hi everyone! Here's episode one of the blog I'll be keeping for CS 100W this semester. Being forced to write a blog on a deadline should be useful, since last time I tried to keep a blog going it fell apart around midterms and never quite recovered. Even though that blog actually had readers to be annoyed at me for stopping.
My family counts as "readers," right?
Anyway. This is me:
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| Me, 6:45am, pre-coffee |
My name's Katharine. I'm a twenty-something CS major with a cat, a part-time job, and, now, a blog. And I'm probably the only white girl in your programming class. Very nice to meet you.
Moving on to this week's assignment topics:
Tell us something about your technical expertise:
Alright, "expertise" is a strong word. Expertise comes when you've worked in a field for a decade and can write a textbook on a subject. I don't have expertise. I've got some knowledge, though. I know about writing code that can be read by another human (even better, code that can be read by myself a year later). I like being hands-on with my code (and, on that note, I actually enjoy writing code. I've been told that's rare, even in this field, and that confuses me more than a little). Thanks to CS 157A, I can tell you all about exponential backoff and why you probably won't get my UDP joke. And, whether this is a technical skill or not, I don't suck at writing English (as far as I know. Correct me if I'm wrong so I can stop embarrassing myself). I can communicate technical ideas to non-technical people in language they can understand.
But at the end of the day, I don't feel like I have expertise. That's why I'm a student, not a lead developer at a massive company. I'm here to get the knowledge I need to one day have expertise in a field, to be the go-to guy for a particular set of problems.
What you find exciting about the field of computer science and challenges you believe you can tackle:
Everything. Computers can do everything. Want a million insanely difficult math problems done while you're at lunch? How about fancy grahpics? You need a family recipe from your fifth cousin twice removed who lives in France? Maybe you just need to know what the weather is like outside your windowless cubicle. You can apply a computer to almost any problem. Code can take people to the moon or waste your time with one more level. There are plenty of multi-purpose tools out there, but code is universal. Technology has made the world more connected. We know more about the world today than ever before.
This is what excites me. There are a million and a half possibilities when you have programming knowledge. I don't know what I want to do with the rest of my life; I have no idea where I want to work. But until I find something, I want to do everything. I want to learn about everything. The more I know, the more I want to learn. This is why I've gone into computer science instead of any of the other subjects I'm interested in: there is no other field that evolves as quickly, no other field that would give the same opportunity to learn something completely new every week. Studying computer science in the heart of the Silicon Valley may be one of the most interesting things I do with my life, and I feel like I've just barely started to scratch the surface.
