Day 0
Did you get your wish?
Day 0
Somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to be an engineer. I grew up building & flying R/C planes, building Legos, playing video games, and a fascination for space travel. So, around my junior year of high school, the decision felt natural. Except that although I was part of my high school's STEM academy, I was far from the student I should have been. I managed to squeak my way into Rowan Engineering, and all seemed (for a while) like it would be fine in the end.
COVID happened, and the illusion of what I thought college was going to be wore off. I had little motivation to continue in electrical engineering, and failed to find the big picture in the work that I did. So, about two and a half years ago, halfway through college, I decided to switch my major to computer science. I had a bit of a knack for programming when I first picked up Java in high school, and figured no matter what I was doing it was going to involve some programming. I had a good time in my early college years picking up C++ and other tools here and there for whatever classes I was taking as an electrical engineer. With a clear(er) path layed out ahead, while having a job at a bar, so began the nearly five (seven if you count summer) semester marathon to finish college, and become a better programmer to reach the future I wanted to see.
Programming always appealed to me the way "individual" sports do, like track. There are few, if any, external factors that, in the end, play into your success. For better or for worse, it's entirely on you. You can choose how far to run.
I wish I could say I made that decision and the switch flipped, the Rocky montage started, and I busted it down on the keyboard 10 hours a day for seven semesters. But simply, there wasn't. What changed, however, was that I could start to see the big picture in the work I did. I was motivated in my classes, and motivated to get home and do more. In retrospective, I am even surprised at the progress I was able to make.
Why I wanted to build Tacos on Mars
Much of my curriculum at the time had very little to do with web development, but it seemed like a sensible place to start. I wish I could say I had any idea how many tutorials for various projects I went through. But at the end of the day, a blog always seemed like a good project to build a full stack application, and thus the idea for what would become "Tacos on Mars" was planted.
First and foremost, I wanted a public page for my recipes, so that like code, my cooking is also open source.
Second, the best way to learn something is to teach it. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would need to read something I wrote to explain something that's probably relatively basic when we have ChatGPT now, but maybe it will just be resources, who knows.
Lastly, I have always enjoyed writing. I started a newspaper in fifth grade, I would write short stories in middle school for extra credit, and high school + college helped me tremendously to read and write more technical papers. It seems writing is a pretty solid way to keep learning and to reflect along the way.
When it came together
After nearly four semesters, I managed to score a summer internship as an IT intern. Towards the end, I decided I was ready to build my blog. I had a clear goal in mind, and I was ready to get started on my first personal portfolio project. I wish I could remember why I chose Django, maybe it was because I was picking up steam in python, who knows. Within a month I picked up the framework and threw together the backend. It took me another few weeks to get relatively close to the frontend I wanted, and I designed that silly little logo in paint (which I should probably recreate as a vector image). Slowly, school took over for the semester. I had a few weeks of winter break, got just a bit closer, all hosted and ready to go. Truthfully I would consistently fall short of writing anything fully that I was willing to publish. But now here we are, three weeks until graduation. I really was busier than I give myself credit for sometimes, in retrospective I had quite a bit going on.
Thankfully, I made a bit of effort to make myself just a bit more well rounded. I started to read again, something I hadn't been able to pour myself into in a long time. I enjoyed reading about entrepreneurship, and took quite an interest in philosophy, especially while enrolled in a sci-fi lit class and getting graded to analyze classics.
While I've always enjoyed eating food (who doesn't), I never realized how much enjoyment I could get out of setting aside a small amount of time to throw on some music and go to town on the stove to be greeted with something delicious at the end, (made with love) as Grandma would say. I also never realized how much I would enjoy feeding my friends, or growing a garden in the backyard of our college rental house.
It is these areas in my life I wanted to put into this website. A painting for me to blot over time, and document the progress I make. I couldn't care less if anyone sees or visits, it is simply for me to stay organized in my endeavors. Then again, who knows, maybe I'll do something useful and it'll end up in a textbook (or a cookbook :^).
What comes next
So, for not yet two weeks now, I have had the pleasure of slowing my pace in this last stretch of the college marathon. I have managed to land the best first job I could possibly ask for, in the industry I had always dreamed of playing a role in. I went from barely passing, to being a straight A student for the first time in my entire life. On top of this, my efforts to teach myself outside of the classroom have come full circle, and I was able to partake in more projects than I would have ever dreamed to get involved in before graduating, and while imposter syndrome never quite wares away, I can say without a doubt I have come a long way as a software engineer.
So, once again, in retrospective... this application was trivial and probably shouldn't have taken me longer than it did. It's almost ironic I am less than three weeks from walking and I am just writing this first official post. At first thought, I had wish I finished it sooner, I beat myself up too much thinking if I didn't get around to something the day did not bear fruit. It's not a fun way to look at things. But on second thought it feels damn good to say now; it's exactly where it needs to be, when it needs to be, and after quite the last two plus years, so is everything else.
So, for these last few weeks I have left before and after graduation, maybe I'll write something, maybe I'll read something, cook something, I don't know. For the first time in a long time, I won't feel bad for not working on this thing.
Adiós and vaya con Dios
Heits