Hey, it’s another year. Where have you been?

Wow.

That’s really all I can say about my situation. Well, my honest reaction would actually be more like a savage facepalm, but you can’t really see that online.

What I want to say is that I’m ashamed of myself. In my last post, I promised myself that I would be active on this blog, yet as you can see, I’ve let myself down yet again. I haven’t been posting for almost a year. What has happened?

I got a job.

And you know what came with getting that job? Contentness. Is that even a word? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that I was so content with my small job and with what I was getting paid that I decided to drop everything I was building online and settle for the regular life.

I stopped trying to better myself. I stopped looking into how to improve my writing, my computer skills, and my programming skills. In other words: I stopped having goals. Since I had let go of all my goals, I just floated through 2017 without any major stress. Was that easy? Yes, but it wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t memorable. And if I think about it hard enough, I probably hate myself for it.

But there isn’t a point in hating myself for how I let last year slip by. Haboring negative emotions for something I did in the past won’t make the present or the future any better. I know I have a tendency to hesitate and waste time which leads to no growth or change in my situation and persona. I want this year to be the year I finally cast away this piece of me that has held me back for as long as I can remember. I want to accomplish my goals and when I finally achieve them, I want to make new goals and face new challenges. I want to be the best version of myself and offer the best to those around me. I’m tired of quitting. As a famous singer-turned-voice-actor put it in song for a popular movie:

“I won’t give up, no I won’t give in

Till I reach the end

And then I’ll start again…”

Yes, I just did that.

Don’t listen to anyone who says adults can’t learn from kid’s entertainment and never be afraid to try everything! (using proper judgement and commonsense, of course. I have to put that out there for certain folks)

Time Keeps Running. Blink and You’ll Miss Something

It’s been a long while since I’ve come around here and quite frankly, I am embarrassed about that fact.

I promised in my previous posts to update about my shenanigans regularly, but, as time proved, all of my promises have just been empty words. I wish I had some valid excuse as to why I have neglected this blog, but the truth is of the lamest kind…

I was lazy.

At first it was just because I couldn’t find the time, then when I had the time, I wasted it on petty distractions and told myself tomorrow I’ll update my blog and when finally tomorrow came, I told myself that I needed a break and I’ll post the next day and I postponed everything. This kept repeating itself for weeks and then those weeks turned into months and finally, here we are, almost five months since I’ve last posted. I’m sincerely embarrassed about my laziness, especially since I’m writing this update on a Wednesday at 5:20 in the morning because I woke up at 3:00am and couldn’t go back to sleep.

Since this blog doesn’t have much followers, there is only one person I should apologize to and, at the same time, blame: myself.

I have let myself down yet again.

Those last two words at the end of that sentence explain it all. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to keeping to a schedule. I make promises and I make plans with myself and other people to do things. Do they ever get done?  Hardly. I have a collection of promises unfulfilled and so many plans that have come into existence just to be pushed off to the side for things that don’t matter or because that day I felt extra lazy.

But it all stops here. I am determined to change my habits.

This year I have decided to use my time for improving myself. I believe anyone can change if they desire it. You just have to acknowledge your weakness and fight against it. For me, the major weakness I’ll be battling here is my laziness. I’ve already came up with a plan of action and I am willing to do anything to stick to it, even if it means scheduling alarms early in the morning or disconnecting my internet so there will be absolutely no distractions to keep me from writing. I want this change to happen and I am interested in seeing how far I can get.

 

P.S this blog will still be dedicated to computer stuff and programming. (I’ll be using my YouTube channel for the more personal side of my journey).

An Unexpected First Lesson

I was thinking of ways to sharpen my C++ coding. Its been a couple months of busy non-coding activity and I haven’t had the chance to practice my skills. At this point I’m a bit nervous about coding again, especially in C++, but I push that self-doubt aside and I decide that looking up coding problems is my best route. I wonder around the popular search engines for a bit and I find that most of the sites I popped into are dedicated to tutorials for beginners. I stumble along these tutorials and I easily lose interest in about five minutes. Too much words, not enough code for an intermediate programmer such as myself. None of them satisfy me until I drop into hackerrank. It looks neat and I am liking the site design. Then I notice there’s a 30 Days of Code challenge and I’m intrigued so I decided to give it a shot and signed myself up.

The first problem is fairly easy. It’s the first few lines of code every programmer starts with: “Hello World”. I saw this and my confidence soared through the roof. I quickly skim through the instructions and when I get to the bottom, there is a box for inputting code. In it, the site already has most of the code down, which made this problem so much more easier. All you need to do is input the code to display the value of string. I type the few lines of code in C++ very quickly and I click the run button. Almost immediately, an error message pops up stating there is something wrong my code. I retype it once more using a different format, thinking that the site didn’t translate it correctly. I get another error. I try again and by this time, my self-esteem is deflating. I spend the next ten minutes trying to find what is wrong with my “Hello World” until I finally decide to visit the discussion section. I skim-read all the cries for help that are posted as I scroll down the page. Most of them seem to be having the same issue as me, but no one has given a good solution until I get to this one comment. I read it and I was ready to facepalm myself so hard that my hand would smash through my head because the answer had always been there the whole time, staring at me from my laptop screen.

My input_string was already defined and I had wasted ten minutes trying to define it.

And this is where I learned my first lesson: READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY.

It seems simple enough, but in reality it is so easy to skim over the instructions and miss important details. I could have saved myself ten minutes of worry and self-doubt if I had paid more attention to the directions. My time was wasted and my poor self-esteem suffered a blow for no reason, but that was the only thing that happened. Imagine if I had done this at work or for a client? What if there isn’t a way that I can catch my mistake and I present my project to an employer and it’s not what they wanted? Remember that the instructions are as equally important as the codes are. A good programmer will read and reread the instructions more than once and ask questions after they’ve done the rereading. Sparing a couple of minutes to understand what the instructions are and what they want you to do is worth it. It could save you a whole lot of time and self-esteem points.

This is my code(I’ve included the everything from Hackerrank as well):

---

int main() {
// Declare a variable named ‘input_string’ to hold our input.
string input_string;

// Read a full line of input from stdin (cin) and save it to our variable, input_string.
getline(cin, input_string);

// Print a string literal saying “Hello, World.” to stdout using cout.
cout << “Hello, World.” << endl;

// TODO: Write a line of code here that prints the contents of input_string to stdout.
cout << input_string << endl;
return 0;

---

This was Day 0 of the 30 Days of Code challenge. I will post about what I learn and how I improve on those 30 days in my blog.

Get to Know Me

Ever since I was little, computers have fascinated me. I started using computers in elementary school and up until my freshmen year in high school, I had only used them for creating research papers and playing arcade games. That changed when I was introduced to social websites in 2005. Back then, the more popular websites allowed users to customize their pages with HTML code. I had never heard of HTML before so I made a google search. The top results were links to HTML generators. The first code I copied from one of those sites was a cute animal mouse pointer. When I used it, I was surprised by how the pointer changed with only some few lines of coding. After that, I dabbled with the background of my page, then from there I changed the font, then I messed around with the format of the paragraphs and pretty soon, I had changed the entire appearance of my personal page. I wasn’t satisfied with just copying and pasting from HTML generators, I wanted to learn HOW this code worked. For the next couple of months, I did my best to learn from these generated codes and tweak them to my liking. Unfortunately, it didn’t pass through my teenager mind that I should google “how to code”. Nonetheless, I had so much fun changing my page. Time went by and a new social website was in. All my peers were into it so followed along. I was heartbroken when it didn’t allow users to format their page to their liking. I quit coding once I made the switch over. There was nothing I could change, but everyone I knew was using this site so I stayed put and I lost interest in furthering my abilities as a coder.

As a kid in my early 20s, I had struggled with finding what I wanted to do after high school. I enjoyed learning and I wanted to do so much. I flopped from school to school and job to job trying to find something I was really passionate about. I knew that the two main things I had always loved learning about were the human body and computers. I first went along the nursing route, but after a couple of lukewarm experiences in the nursing field, I turned toward computers. Fast forward a couple of years and a newly acquired associated degree in computer science, I can say I’ve found something I truly enjoy doing. I enjoy learning a new language and writing code. I like that feeling a programmer gets when they click ‘compile’ and the program runs without any errors. I enjoy checking out a running program and proudly thinking ‘I made that’. That satisfaction is what makes all of the effort, energy, and tears spent on coding worth it.

This is my first post here on this website and I know I must have made a couple of grammar and spelling errors, but that isn’t going to stop me from moving forward. I know I’ll get better at blogging as time goes by. That is what I want to focus on: even if we make mistakes, we don’t give up. I hope I can inspire others to learn to code and to keep coding because mastering how to code is a continuing process. It’s long and sometimes, it can be difficult, but we just have to stick in there.

I will be posting mainly about C++ since I have been practicing that language for a while and I have yet to master it. Some other things I will be posting about are HTML, CSS, hopefully JAVA, and any new languages I’ll be learning in the future. I want to learn and grow then, in a couple of months, I’ll get to see how much I’ve improved.

Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.