Welcome!!! :)

Hello world, this is my first blog post.

I’ve always been the type of kid to focus solely on school and my grades. It was always hard for me to learn stuff outside of school, even if it interested me. Like most kids, I had phases where I wanted to learn things like the guitar or play ice hockey. I would take up a few lessons and then quit because I never wanted to put in the time to learn. The only thing I really put effort into was my schoolwork and it is shown in my grades.

However, as my time in university continues to come closer to an end, I am realizing the uselessness of only having good grades. I’ve been telling myself to start some personal projects for a couple of years now, even dating back to high school but never really kept up with it. Now, with the pressure of applying to co-op jobs looming over me, I’ve decided that it is finally time to get uncomfortable and start some projects.

Another problem, I’ve always had is what to make and what language to use. My thoughts tend to go like this: “I want to use javascript because it seems so practical putting up your projects on a webpage, but I don’t know javascript and it seems hard to learn. I want to create some machine-learning apps (who doesn’t though), but I know almost nothing about machine learning and I still want to focus most of my time exceling at school”. I know a lot of people also have the problem of having so many equally-cool ideas, so you start one, and it’s super hard, so you start another, and it is also super hard and the cycle continues. This leads to almost nothing created and sadness.

So right now, I’m going to focus on creating small projects that use what I know or what I am comfortable with learning. Then hopefully I start to find my niche and I’ll go on from there.

The first project I started working on over the (very short) winter break was a simple game of Pong using the processing application in Java. I still have a lot (A WHOLE LOT) to do before I even want to show people, but it is in the works.

The second project I started today after finishing almost all my homework yesterday solely to build something. It is a discord bot that helps you set reminders. My inspiration came from a youtube tutorial on building a simple discord bot and I decided I could definitely build off of that. I have no experience in Node.js or javascript but I thought it would be nice to finally play around with those tools today. I used a lot of w3schools whenever I needed help with javascript and eventually coded something that worked! It is really simple and the code is very messy but it’s a start. I do plan on making the code a little nicer and maybe adding a few more commands.

Thanks for reading!