My name is Bryan – Founder of Vapor Tech Solutions. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
From an early age, people around me always told me that I should consider pursuing technology as a career path. In my day-to-day life I was always quick to adapt in its usage, and those around me likewise noticed how naturally things would click too. When it came time to enroll in university, I instead found myself equally interested in Psychology and opted to pursue it as a major instead. I used it as a segue into human resource management as I valued the consistency of working in an office setting and found myself working in employment services by the end of it.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic took over and for a while it became difficult to fulfill my professional niche. I used this opportunity to consider other facets and revisit the idea of learning more about computers and tech. I enrolled in a two-year IT Programming curriculum through Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC), and as I waited for courses to begin, I likewise began building a fundamental background prior through NPower Canada through their Junior IT Analyst program.
Taking my studies very seriously and in constantly challenging myself, I would always ensure that I fully understood the material before moving on to the next unit. This helped me build early fundamental critical thinking skills that would go on to shape my software and website development processes. I graduated with a 95.3% average and while finally pursuing a career, also continued with my studies independently via online resources. I believe that the journey for growth the most important aspect of this field due to rapidly developing technologies, and that the challenges that stem from both learning and practice are what allows a programmer to thrive.
https://www.memoriesinaflash.ca/
The company was created in 2010, and its website was created a few years later. The main issue that the owner had was that the website had not been updated since 2015 – nearly a decade ago as of this writing. The implications of this were that much of the information and resources were outdated; ranging prices on services, provided services, media formats and several Flash-based plugins. The company’s blog (managed through WordPress) had also become outdated, leaving it vulnerable from a security standpoint.
I was given the opportunity to use my previous HTML, CSS and PHP classroom experience to make modifications at the client’s request. Many edits were minor, while other pages had been revamped entirely to better match the evolution that the company had gone through over the years. The appropriate WordPress updates were also made on the back end, as well as the removal of problematic points of exploit. Communication was of utmost importance to ensure that the website’s theming matched the vision of the owner, and backups were always maintained as a safety precaution. After about a month of revisions, the company owner was happy with the new state of Memories in a Flash’s website and was assured that any future updates would be handled just as seamlessly.
One of the courses that helped me immensely throughout my first-year work term was Transactional Databases. Though it was initially difficult, it has been the absolute most valuable course with the most real-life application for me. This work experience used a mix of programming in Visual Basic as a language and SQL queries to retrieve data. And though more focused on front-end design, our Windows Programming Course in C# really reassured me of the former idea whether intentional or not.
Many first-year projects are completed in the IDE to ease new programmers into the field. Many second-year projects, however, bring out more front-end designs as it helps to give an idea of what goes into compiling realistic software used by everyday users. Both courses rely on the Chinook database, a music-based catalog containing data using a relational database system. Being able to bring this database to life in the front end in this second-year course, however, was great in being able to properly demonstrate what kinds of applications may be created once we enter the workforce. On the front-end we get to see a concept that mirrors real life music catalogs found online with the same types of application. On the back end however, being able to practice our SQL knowledge, working with scaffolding for both generated and partial classes, filtering data using LINQ, and considering best UI practices are concepts that are imperative to succeed as a Software Developer.
My classmates often said that learning C was the breaking point of when we went from being programming novices to really being able to understand programming. Low-Level programming is very difficult as it requires manual management of resources, but it is also one of the fastest processing languages for the same reason. In terms of creating software, C or C++ serve to be a great means of building high-quality products as it works closer to the hardware than other popular languages.
What really got me interested in programming as a field was admittedly learning how games were made. Likewise, and for our final project, we were tasked with recreating the popular online game Wordle in the command line. This involved reading in a file with the words, number of letters that the word could be, and how many guesses the user was allowed to make.
The project was likely one of the most difficult ones that we had done, but it also served to be the most creative and fun at the same time. It also served to be a reminder of what got me interested in pursuing programming in the first place, how far I’ve come along within that sole year, and how much more there was to both learn and create in the years to come. Being able to create a program such as this one proved to be an incredible and marketable skill for the game’s original creator. Though replication does not serve the same purpose as its initial investment, this type of creative and explorative idea is great for building one’s own creation and hopefully inspiring a new generation of coders as well.