Leveling up?
02 Sep 2021
When I was younger, I knew I wanted to work with something that made a difference to others. As an ambitious 10-year-old girl I dreamed about becoming the prime minister of Norway or the president of the United States. However, in recent years I have realized that there are other possibilities than becoming a prime minister that can make a positive impact on the society we live in. Becoming a software engineer has given me valuable technological insight that can contribute to solving bigger problems like climate change, war conflicts and poverty.
Recent developing
The last couple of years I have learned the ability to adapt to new programming languages quickly. During my first three years of studying Cybernetics and Robotics, I have written in languages like C++, Python, Go, C, C# and Matlab. I have attended interesting practical classes where we have developed software like a real-time elevator-system using multi-threading and UDP-communication. In these classes we have also been able to learn about important concepts of software-development like thorough planning (with design reviews) and collaborative tools like Github. I have also been taking classes that have given me insight in control theory, mathematical modeling and simulation of physical systems (like a helicopter) where we have used Matlab and Simulink to stabilize and change the properties to the system. These interesting real-world problem-tasks that can be implemented into real-world physical objects have given me a lot of motivation to continue solving these problems in a broader scale.
Taking it to a higher level?
Although I find low-level programming to be exciting and fun, I have realized that a lot of software engineers are enjoying working with web-development and high-level languages like HTML and JavaScript. What am I missing out on? I want to experience and gain insight in this web-developing community, so I know what I want to work with in the future. Therefore, I am looking forward to learning JavaScript this fall and to implement code on the “real” system- the world wide web. Maybe I will want to “level up” my programming career to a high-level language?