I have had a running interest in learning how to program for about the last eight years. While I could surely look for reasons as to why I haven’t become a programmer, most of it is on me. There have been periods when I got stuck in and felt that I had learnt something. I just never got to the next level after introduction to…. I became pretty good at the basics, but very much inadequate at anything beyond.

Background

I knew that I wanted to learn computers before I got to high school. As luck would have it (it really is about luck in Kenya), I went to a school that offered computer studies. Again luckily, I was placed in one of the two classes that had the option of taking the subject. And wouldn’t you know it, I was one of the lucky fourteen who drew lots and found ourselves in the computer lab. This was meant to be, right?

The computer lab in form one was a frustrating place. The syllabus had nothing that expected you to interact with a computer for the year. Well, you could touch it, but not switch it on! This of course meant that when the bell went for our lesson, we would rush there and pray the teacher took his time. I would get to the lab, quickly switch on the computer, and marvel at… Windows 2003 and Microsoft Word. Most of the time though, I would just search for music and videos my seniors had left on the computer. I knew then, that the syllabus was messed up, and I could have told them, but nobody asked.

I took to sneaking into the lab after classes whenever the form fours were working on their projects. It helped that I had a friend in that class. What I remember seeing were guys sitted at their gray screens with lines of text running up. It was beautiful, it was Pascal! I couldn’t wait to learn it. But I never did! By the time I was doing my project, the school only taught Microsoft Access. While I learnt how to build a user interface around a “database”, I don’t remember doing anything beyond simple macros. To sum it up, high school disappointed me.

Que the first year in university. It is definitely a time to be excited right? Well, not for me. This time my luck had run out. I got placed into the course I had picked as my fourth choice, fourth! But it was still my choice. A year or two before I was (un)fortunate enough to see the university presenting their Geomatic engineering course, with satellite imagery for show. I thought, hey, if I don’t get to learn computers, I can at least learn how to use them to do something interesting. That was poor thinking, and it didn’t take long for me to find out just how poor.

I don’t believe I ever achieved 40hrs in a programming class in my 5yrs in university! That was sad. We got introduced to programming in C. With a theory and practical class. Each week you had two hours where you sat looking at code written on the board! C++ was covered next, but someone forgot to tell the lecturer to stop covering the same basics we had covered. We ran through python sometime in the fourth year, but the less said about that the better.

Failures

Ichi

The first project I tried to implement was done with a classmate as part of the ‘science contest’. Note the ‘tried’. The idea was simple, to build a system to ease the process of taking out an insurance cover, and applying for claims. With what I had been taught in class, the technology I had available to me was of course, Microsoft Access. The backend and part of the frontend were thus taken care of. The problem; the user facing website.

We knew about the existence of HTML but no idea of how to write it. I don’t even remember if we ever knew about CSS. Bring in the small matter of tying the Access forms to the website and we were screwed! I remember standing there, infront of a panel and an audience, and presenting… nothing! A virus had conveniently eaten the little we did have to present! To make matters worse, we had like two manila papers that only introduced our project! Guess now I know why I never feel comfortable presenting.

Ni and San

I got my own laptop in my second year of university. By then I had met the great Doctor Google and learnt that there were things called blogs. A simple search magically landed you on Wordpress. Naturally, before long, I had a Wordpress blog. Yay!

The concept of just choosing a theme and changing the wording here and there, definitely makes things easy. A little too easy for me. I was never going to be satisfied clicking around to change colors. I wanted to make the blog mine. But I couldn’t. Hell, I was not even able to figure out where to begin! So, a few months of inactivity then straight on to Blogger. Seemed like a good decision at the time, but, catastrophe! After that, I just did not feel like writing anymore.

Learning to Learn

I make too much noise when I write. I’ll follow this up with a part II.