How I got sucked in…

 

By AnemoneProjectors – Peter O’Connor

I’ve not been here for a while and I don’t have any real reason to be, except that I miss WordPress – the interface and reading the beautiful things others are writing on this platform.

I’ve been really busy.

First I stumbled into R, which totally messed up my head. It was love at first sight. As I progressed, not only in learning about this powerful language and using it for my work, I wanted to write a package or two. I got a hold of Hadley Wickham’s one of seminal works and discovered that R was built on C and C++, and that many of its functions directly called these lower level languages. So I decided that I needed to learn some C++, at the very least – I’ve made some reasonable progress with that as I have written a program that I can use as a staff directory in my office instead of scanning some paper for people’s details. All of this naturally sucked me in to Git – thankfully I had started learning how to use a computer with MS-DOS, so I wasn’t too afraid to go back to working with a command line interface. And I found that life was a lot easier with Powershell as I could pretty well use my newly upgraded Windows machine without having to learn zilch about the new interfaces.

To crown it all, I signed up for Harvard’s CS50x and I find by looking through the curriculum that, by the time I’m done with the course, I would have been introduced to C, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and SQL (at the very least).

What the heck have I gotten myself into?