Hello, world!

A Little About Me

So here we are… The beginning of code. My name is Zach Dreher and I have held various jobs throughout my life. I ultimately became a police officer and have been doing it since 2014. I love the job and the people I get to come into contact with. Some bad, some good… However, I am the most introverted person out there, and let’s be honest, a lot of people dislike cops. So I decided to begin a new venture that will hopefully allow me to land a job doing another one of my passions. Coding! I recently became interested in the subject and knowing nothing about it, I began searching on Google. I watched countless YouTube videos and found a class that might be just right. Harvard’s CS50…

Week 0 CS50

Knowing nothing about coding, I jumped right in to CS50. I started with learning some basic coding lingo and ended the first week making a project in Scratch. The program was easy enough to deal with up until it came to make my own project. Being the gamer I am, I thought it would be neat to recreate the classic pong game. Holy hell did I want to pull my hair out. It took me three days and a bunch of alcohol and cigars to get to a finish point. Once there, I learned a valuable lesson. Coding is not easy and this was coding with training wheels. The project was finished and I was overall happy with the result. I submitted the project and successfully passed all the checks. Win!

Week 1 CS50

The next week was an introduction to C programming. The granddaddy of them all. I was a bit intimidated by this week, but I was hungry for more. This was when I was introduced to basic commands, variables, loops, and how to implement them all. I had no idea what the professor in the lecture was talking about. I still don’t. But what do you do? You continue forward hoping to have one of those “Ah Ha!” moments. Let’s be honest. This hasn’t happened yet. The lecture is done and I get to the lab portion. I learn they want me to find out how many llamas I will have in a certain amount of years if so many are born and so many die. I was instructed to write a program to calculate this in C. After receiving the instructions, I dive in. I start up Vs Code and make my boilerplate and then nothing… I have no idea what to do. After fumbling around with the code, I tried to get something to work but could never get it right. I ended up just saying screw it and watched the lab lecture. The TA did a good job of walking through the problem but I still had no clue what he was talking about. This led to me pressing on to the end-of-week problem set.

The Problem Set

I was instructed to make some kind of algorithm that would calculate how many coins to give back to a customer. I found it to be deceptively easy after I overthought it. After watching a YouTube video of course I found out it was super simple. Once complete, I learned something about the world of coding. When you first begin it’s okay not to have a clue what you’re doing. Apparently, it’s part of the game. So if you are like me and are learning to code on your own, stay with it. Stay hungry. I have not gotten to the point yet where it has just clicked, but I trust it will. If you’re having problems watch YouTube videos, read a book, or talk to someone you know in the field. You’ll gain useful tools along the way. Another option is to walk away from it for a couple hours. You might come back with a new sense of how to work out a particular problem.

Food For Thought

Coding is the one thing that will make you pull your hair out. You’ll throw things, cry, maybe even scream at your cat, but five words will help you. There will be a tomorrow. You’ll come back refreshed but still have no clue. Eventually, we will get there, but until then stay tuned.