I started learning HTML through Khanacademy Novermber of 2017. I began to understand how tags like the p tag to the div tag were the building blocks of any webpage. It interested me and made me eager to find out what other tags I could use and combine with other to make a variety of webpages.
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I started learning CSS through Khanacademy November of 2017. I began to learn how to use colors, shapes, and other special features to turn a boring black-and-white webpage into a page pouring with magical color goodness. The ability to transform a webpage by moving around content, reshaping their borders, resizing the space between the text and the other content, designing images- I think you get the idea. With the right combination of colors and with the help of Bootstrap, these webpages begin to look like they were created for real-life business webpages.
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I statred learning JavaScript through Khanacademy in the summer of 2017 and throughout the remainder of the year with Codecademy. I was taught how to draw shapes and add color to the surrounding areas of different shapes. On codecademy, I exposed myself to one of the dynamic programming languages that power today's applications such as Google and Youtube. JavaScript also is behind the basic to complex computer games on the web and on gaming consoles. I has learned how to store data types and to create basic functions that activate a block of code.
In the Spring of 2021, after realizing my career path in full-stack development, and after taking programming classes in college so far, I returned to JavaScript and learned about OOP, ES6, and other important server-side features of the language. I have a better understanding of the capabilities of JavaScript, and I am eager to use the front-end and back-end knowledge that I now have to create real-working web applications.
JavaScript is use alongside HTML and CSS, creating interactive webpages for users. From magical animations and styling of the client side to the logical programming and databases, JavaScript is like the foundation of the full-stack. JavaScript is really cool to use, and I am excited to see what I can do with the new knowledge I now have in programming and web development. Like they all would say: "Yah gotta practice and struggle to find the fun in programming."
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Python started learning Python through Codecademy and SoloLearn November of this year (2018). I realized that Python is one of the programming languages used to prepare college students for their careers as a computer Science major. With that in mind, I am eager to hit the ground running when I begin my first year of college soon. Python is used to store and organize data structures along with other purposes. It is mainly used to develop web and mobile applications. (Update) After taking "Discrete Math" in the Spring of 2020, I was taught about objects and how a programmer can create their own defined object and use it in their program. I learned about the use of functions, loops, its incredible use in working with mathematics along with the many APIs that are used on many web applications. Its a pretty awesome language!
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I took "Intro To C Programming" in Fall of 2019 in my first year of college. This was one of the first official programming classes I've ever taken. Here, I learned all of the fundamentals of programming that I got to work with in Python, but I was introduced to working with data types in variable and function declaration along with the use of pointers. These are special variables that allow a programmer to access a variable's memory address. I also got to work with memory by understanding the char data type and arrays, which are consecutive blocks of memory that can store a list of ints, strings, are other bigger data structures. To add on, chars are a one bit character data type that can create a string, which is an array of chars. With a string of characters is what's called a null character (\0), which is a flag that says we don't need to access anymore memory. As you can see, I've learned a lot from this class and I'm glad I have another programming language under my belt.
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I took "Intermediate to C/C++ Programming" and "Data Structures and Algorithms" in the Spring and Fall semesters of 2020, respectively. Within the two courses, I got to learn C++, which is an upgraded version of C.
One of the main highlights of C++ are classes, a user-defined data type that a programmer can create to represent a real-life object using attributes and methods. I've learned about reading and writing to files, enumeration types, structs, and data structures. These are data entities that store data in a range of different methods. There are linked-lists, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, and hash tables. These data structures are used in all software applications across many devices. Google Maps uses Graphs to identify the best route in many situations, a lot of editors like Adobe use stacks to undo and redo actions done in the work space, and companies use hash tables to scramble user passwords and other sensitive information to kept it protected from hackers. C++ is also used for fields in Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Game Development, Embedded Systems, and Blockchain Development.
I've also learned a lot of algorithms and their usefulness in solving serveral certain sorting problems in real-world applications along with Big-O notation and how the implementation of a program can affect the time and space complexity of the results it needs to produce. In conclusion, I love this language and it is one of the best languages to explore and to learn from.
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I just finished taking Intro to Java in the Spring of 2021, and I've gotten to not only use the language to develop a software application, but I also understand why it's such a popular language in the tech industry. There are so many applications to Java, from game development, Android development, anything mobile, software applications, cybersecurity tools, and the list goes on and on.
This semester, I worked in a group of five and we used JavaFX and MySQL to create a schedule-like application with a UI, user accounts, and a live database to store the credentials of both user and admin accounts. Knowing me, I had a lot of fun designing and developing the GUI. Figma was a huge help; it's a lot easier to code what you want if you already have an idea of what your page should look like. I used a ton of JavaFX objects like buttons, text fields, and event handlers and I got to use other objects for the rectangles to create a "div-like" effect with the text, CSS properites, and different types of panes I used to group children objects together for vertical/horizontal alignment, and to stack elements on top of one another. This project brought me back to the old times where I would spend hours on end using HTML and CSS to design and build my own UI design. It was a time.
I'm walking away from this course knowing another language and its capabilities in the tech industry. I've also gotten to connect the application to my MySQL Workbench and see our project come to life. It's so satifying creating stuff like this. I loved this class and everything we learned in it!
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I took "Databases and SQL" in the Fall of 2020 and I got to dive into a different side of programming. I was taught about relational databases and got to learn about normalization, cardinality, and the identification of every column in a table. I got to use MySQL Workbench to use SQL commands to create my own tables, assign my own Primary and Foreign keys, identify and create relationships between certain tables. I also got to create a made-up business of my own (a church business) where I became the Database Administrator and managed the simplication of my table through Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams. I was able to actually use SQL to query my own tables in my database, join tables, run subqueries and access the exact information I needed.
In the Intro to Java Programming course, I got to apply my knowledge in this course when creating an actual real-world-like application. I was able to not only connect my IDE to a database on MySQL Workbench, but I got to see how query statements written in the Java IDE would process and display the results of the query in the terminal. It was one of the moments that made me realize how applications are truly able to run on databases, with some logic development of course.
Every website that stores users' credentials uses a database, and with SQL Injection being a security threat to these databases, its important to udnerstand the power behind databases and the language that allows us to create, access, and manipulate the tables that hold data from around the web.
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