"No code exercise this week... INSTEAD: Blog about how you feel about the world of programming, where you want to go with your career, what professional options you are considering, etc!"
So. The above sentence is the "assignment" for the week. Fun.
How I feel about the world of programming? Not really sure what I feel on the matter, really. It's certainly more fun and interesting than trying to figure out Fourier transforms and weird crystal structures. Still enjoy certain sciences a little bit more though, since I do have a bunch of bio-related blogs on my feed. Fun reads, including a time-lapse vid of a zebra fish embryo bursting. Anyways. Much like the sciences, it's always changing. Unlike the sciences, it's probably changing a lot faster than any of the big 3 fields.
Career path is still rather mixed. Would love to go into game programming since that's something that's always been on the radar, as bad as I am with the actual coding. But I already have a background in nutrition and biochemistry, so I could always end up going back to those sciences and possibly build models that way. Because data always needs to be modelled somehow. There's also the fact that I hate stats, so anything that doesn't involve p-/z-/t-values and the like, the better. Not sure how practical either career paths are, but we'll see. But really, it's because I have practically no artistic skill (doodles don't count, I excelled at musical theory/can barely play any high level music to save my life), so technical skill is the one thing to build. Not that they're mutually exclusive.
As for professional options... Mainly looking towards anything game-oriented. Games were, and still are, the driving force behind wanting to learn how to program. I don't care about net programming (which I suppose is ironic since I enjoy editing wikis), don't really care about OSes, or a lot of other things. Just that one little obsession that began almost 20 years ago, much to my mother's annoyance (she was of the opinion that little girls shouldn't touch games; she's loosened up since then). Might also take some logic related courses as those are always interesting. I wonder if "Alice in Wonderland" is going to be incorporated into the courses? I remember having to deal with that when I took a first-year logic course for the hell of it during my last year of university and then having to live through that little nightmare. Already had to deal with it during high school for English. But the book is an interesting study in how words work.
I've always loved figuring out how games worked. While I do obsess over characters, settings and stories, it's always the mechanics that draw me back. There haven't been that many games that I've obsessively played. They could probably be counted on 1 hand, really. I also like my games difficult, but fair. Demon's Souls is probably one of the better examples this generation, save for one of the areas. If you died, it was your fault (says the one that has vaulted off ledges at least 100 times).
Anyways, going back to that recipe wiki. Way too many pages need to be cleaned up. Then there's the issue of having to finish up a long to-do list for another wiki I'm admin at. Recently regained motivation to play through the game again, and hopefully will complete that challenge along with whatever else I "need" to get done. Seriously, no one really needs to know how long that to-do list, and it's only going to get longer if other players keep coming up with things to test.
I'll probably continue adding little bits and pieces along the way... If I don't get distracted by other things first.
