Programming Monkey

Welcome…

…to my blog, where HOPEFULLY I manage to update it at a fairly decent rate. My name is Ryan and I am a Computer Science student at Mount Royal University. Truth be told I probably wouldn’t consider it a University as it has very little actual research occurring, as well as no postgraduate degrees, but that’s neither here nor there. My degree is a transfer degree, meaning that after my 2nd year, I will be transferring to the University of Calgary.

My last attempt at a blog was a complete and utter failure. I managed just 2 posts in over a year. Hopefully my attempt at a relaunch sees more activity. Oh, and sorry to any readers from Russia, but I will not be accepting any comments from a .ru domain. Too many spammers and I don’t have time to delete 1600 comments. (Yes, I had to do that on my old blog)

PS I do apologize for the name of this website. If you were expecting a good programmer, I’m afraid I’m very much a novice in many respects.

Site Content

Despite the name, I’m more than likely going to mix my other interests in with the blog posts of this site. I have many interests, so expect content to be anything from electronics and other gadgets to literature and exercise.

A Brief History of (My) Time

I’m currently 23 years old, so it’s quite obvious that I did NOT go directly from HS to a CS degree. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to find out what truly interested me. During my youth, the closest I got to programming was editing Quake 2 config files and console commands in the games I played.

While I have always been around computers, regularly using them since the age of 6, my use of them was limited to customizing games and finding ways to derive more enjoyment from them. I coasted through school, doing the bare minimum required to advance in grade. During grade 12, I did a bit more of my homework. Once again, just enough to get an 85 so that I didn’t need to worry about post-secondary options being closed off to me. I think there are many like myself. I found little to no challenge in the K-12 schooling years, so I was mostly just bored.

I took a year off from school after that. I worked various jobs during that time, and I learned very quickly that I would not be happy working at warehouses or doing manual labor. That sort of thing was too dull for my mind. In any job I’ve had, the second I stop learning is when the cynicism begins. After a year, I was VERY tired of these jobs, so I applied to a University for a BComm degree, following in roughly the same footsteps as my older brother.

In the summer before I started my program, I started working in a restaurant as a line cook. This proved to be quite beneficial to me, as I learned a great deal about cooking that I can use now. It also lead to another branch in my search for what I truly wanted to do.

Towards the end of my second year of University, it was apparent to me that I was not interested in any of the branches I could follow from a business degree. I dropped out and began to pursue a career as a chef. The timing was quite strange really. Just as I was realizing that I did not want to continue pursuing a business degree, my head chef came to me and said that he saw a lot of potential in me. I was offered a paid culinary education at a local technical school. At the time I was overjoyed and temporarily accepted. I moved from a line cook to the prep line, working full time hours as a prep cook.

Over about 6 months of full time work, I came to many grim realizations. First off, I realized that I stopped learning very quickly at this job. The restaurant was a production restaurant, where the prep cooks and even the head chef have no creative control over the menu at all. On top of that, I found out that the education I would receive was in fact extremely limited. Rather than sponsor their employees for a real, full 2 year diploma, it was a modified program where you worked and went to school at the same time. Essentially, it was an extremely basic culinary education in comparison with the regular program offered at this particular school.

Other hard facts of the industry struck me as well. If anyone has worked in a kitchen, they will likely know of this ridiculous disparity between the amount of money they are paid versus what waiting staff receive. I have dreams and aspirations far beyond my working life. I want children and I want to be able to comfortably support them at the same time. I am also a family man first and foremost.

I have an amazing family, and I had a choice to make. If I continued to pursue a culinary career, I didn’t want to do it half assed. I would continue working at my current restaurant for a little while, and start paying my own way through a culinary education so that I received a proper one. Once I graduated, however, I would not stay in my current city. I would travel abroad. Europe, New York, etc. That was my only option were I to continue as I saw it. The last thing I wanted to do was become a chef with the current company. Many of the head chefs and managers of this particular restaurant chain were alcoholics or divorced and miserable for a good reason. I recall one such fellow that I met actually had to blow into his steering wheel to turn his car on.

My other option was to find something else.

I decided on something else. I just couldn’t leave the family. The most obvious ‘something else’ was right in front of me. I spend a great deal of time on my computer and I have a curious mind. I enrolled in a Bachelor of Computer Information Systems degree and I learned that I quite enjoy programming.

I spent a year at Mount Royal in the Information Systems degree, after which I switched to Computer Science. I had maintained a 3.9+ GPA almost effortlessly and I felt like I was wasting my time because I could learn so much faster than they taught. It was unfortunate, but I realized the program I was in was very basic. When I asked one of my professors how many of the students from this degree had went on to do non web related work, he said he remembered 1 student. Most of the rest were working on websites. While I actually don’t mind doing website work, the fact that so many were working on projects like that scared me a little. I’m sure it was probably just a sign of the times, as the explosion of the web has resulted in a great many opportunities, but I was still curious about the details. I wanted to know about the bits. I wanted to know assembly and understand compilers and operating systems at a fundamental level because I was intrigued. With the Information Systems degree, it was likely I would rarely use a compiler, let alone understand one.

After a year doing Computer Science, I can safely say I made the right decision. My friends that stayed in the Information Systems program tell me that it is still hopelessly easy, and I found that in the first semester of my Computer Science degree alone, we managed to cover more material than an entire year of the other degree. I’ve discovered I actually enjoy math and it’s applications are intriguing to me within computer graphics. That’s where I currently stand. I am very excited for next year. As much as I like Math, with my 1st year being math heavy, my 2nd year is very programming heavy and that’s what I can’t wait for.