Preparing Myself to Learn Programming

My first exposure to any programming involved writing Batch scripts - think shell scripts for Windows.

The first time I used a computer was an IBM XT clone. It ran DOS.

I was 11 years old when I got my second computer, a nifty Windows 95 machine. I kept all of my games organized on that second computer. One day I thought of making a number-based menu for my games using Batch scripts. That’s where it started.

Fast-forward a year or so, my parents wanted me to apply to Saint Joseph School. I was in class 5 at that time. They bought me some computing studies books that were used at that school.

One of the books had some example QBasic programs at the end of it. That’s where I got my second dose of exposure and saw some “real” programs (in case you wouldn’t call writing Batch scripts programming).

A few years later, my father bought a Bengali IME software, Orko. That software was developed by Daffodil Software Ltd. It was like Avro (the one you use to type Bengali phonetically). I wanted to build something like Orko in Visual Basic / Visual Basic .NET. That’s where I got my exposure to reading documentation, mostly around Win32 and Windows API.

And then, some years later, I entered university.

Now dig this: the first time I learnt that you could sort an array without needing multiple arrays and without doing it at O(N^2) was during my CSE105 classes.

That’s when I realized that all these years, I was only preparing myself to learn to program.

This post is 7th of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.