How I started Programming

At the early stage of my university studies, I was learning the basics of computer programming. To be honest, first few months were a nightmare. I couldn’t  figure out what I was learning, what’s the actual real world use of those printing triangles, squares and different shapes using “for” and “while” loops. C and C++ were the languages our lecturer thought us during the first two semesters of our university studies.

Somehow I managed to complete the first year of my uni studies but still didn’t know much about programming. All I did was reading the text books, lecture slides and prepare for the exams.

At the end of second year we were asked to complete a group project. We were allowed to use any programming language and come up with a software system to build. I was assigned to a group with other four strangers and there was a guy who had some idea about programming, so we elected him as our leader. Working close to him, I gradually got the hang of how to actually programme. We choose PHP as our primary programming language. I was given the task to build the logging screen and some views. I spent one and half week’s in front of the computer searching on google about how to get started with PHP.

After a couple of weeks, I was in a position to design a simple web page, add some text boxes and buttons and connect to a database. During the next few days, I practiced how to insert data to MYSQL database and how to retrieve it and display on the web page. By now I had a much clear idea about the actual use of programming.

During our third year studies we were mostly taught about JAVA and C#. That’s the time where things really started to work for me. I got kind of addicted to C#. Writing small programs during my free time, teaching others the basic concepts, reading tutorials made things even more awesome.

By the end of fourth year I was a pretty good programmer. A lot of guys took tuition from me and I was really happy to help them out. On our final year research project I was the main programmer and we managed to compete in a national level competition in Sri Lanka but unfortunately, we couldn’t winL. Anyway,   it was a great experience.

After completing four years in university and learning different programming languages, finally I settled with C# to start my career. Took me a couple of months to find my first job in C# and at the same time managed to find some part time work as well so, the income was better than I expected J.

Now after several years of programming, working for several companies, I moved to Australia. Right now I’m working as a “Solutions Consultant” in a Melbourne based company. That’s my journey as a programmer and I hope I could learn many things in the years to come. J