This year, Computer Science Education Week will be
December 7-13, 2020. In honor of CS Education Week, I wanted to write this blog
post about the first computer game I wrote, and what I learned along the way. I
was about thirteen, and this story picks up near where I left off in my previous
blog post about my first computer program. When I wrote that blog post in 2017, I was
working mostly from memory. Since then, I actually found an old floppy disk
with my game on it. And finding that old floppy disk got me thinking about about
how much I learned from writing computer games in my childhood, and how much
others might be able to learn from writing their own first computer games today.
The Social Dilemma came out about a month
ago and got a lot of people thinking about the influence the internet and social
media have on their daily lives. I’m a programmer, and I’ve worked for an
internet advertising company, so none of this was new information to me. But for
a lot of the American public, watching The Social Dilemma was an eye-opening
experience into the ways that internet companies try to track and manipulate
people. Many of my friends used words like “unsettling” and “eerie” to describe
how they felt after seeing the film, but most of them also weren’t really sure
what to do about it. They weren’t sure how to make positive changes in their own
lives.
Setting up a development environment correctly might not seem like a big deal at
first, but an incorrectly set-up environment can cause a lot of problems down
the road if you’re not careful. In my experience, the internet’s full of
solutions – both good and bad – for environment problems, but often does a poor
job of explaining why a solution’s good or bad. And installing Ruby can be
tricky if you’ve never done it before. So here’s my advice.
ConfessIt is an examination of conscience app for Catholics. Available on Android, iOS, and the web. The Android version has 4.7 stars in the Google Play App Store after more than 730 reviews.
About
I'm a Web Software Engineer at Strava. I have experience in a range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Javascript, and Android. In my increasingly scarce free time, I develop some websites and Android apps. I maintain ConfessIt, an app for Catholics, with a 4.5 star rating after more than 550 reviews and 28,000 downloads.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Colorado School of Mines in 2011 with a degree in computational and applied mathematics; I subsequently completed a Master's of Education at the University of Denver as part of the Denver Teacher Residency. After a short stint of full-time teaching, I returned to the field of software engineering at SpotX, where I worked for 3 years before joining Zen Planner and finally moving on to Strava.
