What I learned in four years in the world of Computer Science
Tags: programming, beginners, discuss, career
Published: 2023-11-24 22:55:57

Over the 4 years I do Computer Science I learned a few things, in this publication I will share with you some tips and experiences that I experienced in college, and in my passage through the job market.

I learned to program when I got into college four years ago, but attention, I didn't say I learned there, but I started just when I got into higher education. I had my first experience with algorithms, and after a while on https://scratch.mit.edu/ practicing as a happy child, we then moved on to a pseudo language known as Portugol, where we then solved our first basic problems like average calculations, sums, and of course, the first Hello World was written and printed on the screen in a black terminal.
After some time shaping the head to think about the algorithms we then went to a programming language, at the university where we study we learned in C, which is considered the mother of many languages, and in my particular opinion is a good way to start programming. We learned all the basic concepts there, declaration of variables, functions, vectors, matrices and pointers in which I had a little difficulty at first. In this same period I met a wonderful project of the university entitled Programming Marathon, this project consists of the formation of teams to participate in competitive programming events, through it I could improve my logical reasoning, learn more about Dynamic Programming, Graphs and Trees.


In the second year of the course I had contact for the first time with Java, in the discipline of Object Oriented Programming, it was a somewhat traumatic matter and for this reason I did not learn very well the concepts of OO, so I ended up unfairly condemning the language for some time. That same year I participated in my first and to this day only Hackathon, which was promoted by NASA, the NASA Space Apps Challenge, where we had a number of real problems and we should choose some of them to work on a possible solution using technology, innovation, and why not, a little code.


In my third year of the course we had then the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19, a period of adaptations and disruption of daily life, it was then that same year 2020 that I got my first opportunity in a startup that deals with iOT, initially it was a shock to me, because I had never dealt with the technologies that they used there, React on the Front end, and Django on the Back end. I was hired as a Full-Stack Development intern, developed internal projects and maintained the existing platform for 11 months, when unfortunately the startup decided to terminate my internship contract, it was an environment That I liked to work, but was a little full of having to deal with a project that at that time of my career was bigger than me, required technical knowledge that I am still acquiring today.


I am currently working in a large American company, also as an intern, in a completely light environment and with a lot of growth for my professional and personal side, in all these years that I spent developing I learned some important lessons, the main ones are related to resilience, in programming we get frustrated very often, hence the need for perseverance in solving our problems, until we reach our goals. Another great important lesson that I learned from all the time developing was to invest diligently in time and dedication for each of the things that I needed to learn to solve my problems, that way I would not need to relearn anything and would not generate rework, and also knowledge never it's too much, for example, I had a hard time understanding how requests for APIs worked, but after dedicating myself a little to this subject, today this has become a facility, and for those who work with Web technologies it is also a great necessity understanding of this topic.


Well, to summarize and conclude this publication, the message that remains after these years of experience is, study, practice, be resilient, but also respect your growth time, each of us has time to learn something new, that is completely normal and part of the development cycle. I hope you enjoyed this text, it was written with an open heart, sharing several experiences of mine and my professional life over the 4 years that I have been doing Computer Science.