A little bit about me

I'm a 22 year old student attending the University at Albany. I'm going into my last semester and am looking for jobs in software engineering!

I've been programming for just about 5 years now and have loved (almost) every second. I started out in high school with an AP Computer Science class that I took to fill a gap in my schedule. At the time I thought why not, should be interesting and maybe I can make a dumb app when I was finished with the class. I never thought that I would become so fascinated by programming and fall in love with the intricacies that come with it! Starting out with a simple "Hello World!" program in Java, all the way to making my own text adventure game was incredible! The game itself was awful but I was hooked, I had to keep programming and get better.

Before I found programming, I had another obsession, juggling. All throughout high school, I was a semi-professional juggler. I would go around to different venues throughout the Hudson Valley and put on a juggling act. Now before you get all excited and think you found a former juggling super star, ready to make his comeback to the big stage I'm sorry to break it to you, but I'm retired (Didn't realize I was apart of the FIRE movement until now). I still juggle as hobby now but more importantly, juggling taught me something important: what exactly a deligent work ethic can accomplish. I know, what a boring thing to take away from juggling, but bare with me here.

I'll warn you now, I might get a bit preachy here.

So I'm gonna state something obvious here, juggling is hard. No matter who you are, it is something that you just can't do first try. The first time I tried to juggle 3 balls I was about 7 and boy did I suck. I didn't get close at all on my first try and that really bummed me out and I gave up. I wasn't able to succesfully juggle 3 balls until about 7 years later all. It took me so long because I never seriously committed to practicing juggling. To get to a point where I could say "I'm ok at juggling" took hours and hours of practice. I wish I had documented how long I spent juggling since it would be fun to know how many hours of my life I spent practicing. I was lucky enough to have a mentor to help me become a better juggler and there was something he always said: "10,000 hours". It was in reference to the study that stated to master any skill takes approximately 10,000 hours. Before juggling, I used to think that you were just naturally good at something. To some extent I still think that is true, but juggling was showed me it doesn't matter. Juggling was something that gave me an easy visual reference of my improvement. I'd struggle for days trying to learn a new trick, constantly dropping balls, missing catches or not understanding the pattern. I'd take a break, digest what I had been doing and come back to it later. Then it would slowly start to click. Everything would make sense. It never started out pretty but the more time I spent with the trick the cleaner the pattern, catches and throws would get. I understood what the 10,000 hour rule was trying to tell me. Practice. If I wanted to get good at something, you need to play around with it, fail at it, try out new methods and fail at it again. This right here is the most important thing I got out of juggling.

I've carried over the mantra of 10,000 hour over from juggling and apply it to my programming. Reading through documentation, getting errors and fixing bugs may be dry and annoying, but at the end of the day I know that I'm improving. I think I'm so drawn to programming like I was to juggling for the same reasons. It's difficult to get at first, but if you put in the time you really do improve. I bring this to every program I write. I will try every last solution I can think of. I am determined to get a broken program working as best as it possibly can. Giving me a task to program something I have no prior knowledge about is the best thing that anyone can do for me. I want those kind of challenges because I want to continually improve.

Thanks for reading and stopping by my website! Here's a bision as a reward:

                                                
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