Personal Narrartive

First Name Last Name, English Composition I, Personal Narrative, 20 November 2017

In the early 1980s my family purchased a home computer, the TI-99/4A. The TI-99 had a cassette tape drive, the ability to play cartridge-based games, and most importantly, allowed users to write their own programs in BASIC. By writing my own software for the TI-99, I discovered my passion for solving problems through writing code.

I was six years old when I first tried to write a computer program. The TI-99 my dad brought home included a

reference book on the BASIC programming language. I had already started reading traditional novels, and this just presented a new and interesting challenge. I swam through IF THEN statements, jumped from line to line with GOTO commands, and got

lost in a few WHILE loops. My objective was to create a video game that I could sell and become rich and famous. I started in the obvious place; I attempted to rip off the game Super Mario Brothers. First, I broke down the key components for how Mario jumped up to smash a brick above him. Next, I determined how the user would input the jump and wrote the necessary code to process the request and determine if Mario’s jump was in the right location to destroy the brick. After many iterations, I finally had a working prototype and dragged my siblings and parents to the computer to watch me press a key and make my character jump. The joy I felt was immense and is still a vivid memory over thirty years later.

Eventually, the TI-99 burnt out from overuse, and little curls of smoke from its vents signaled the end. We didn’t replace the computer, and I moved on as a teenager and young adult to less technological pursuits. I bounced from job-to-job in my late teens to early twenties in a series of unsatisfying attempts to find a career. I spent time as a department store cashier, a customer service reprensenative, a bus boy, and then finally, a data entry clerk. Each day I received a stack of papers that I would evaluate, code for processing, and then transcribe into the system. Every aspect of the job was monotonous and worse, inefficient. I found myself contemplating the

problem and thinking about the process, and the system I entered my data into and began to design new screens

with new behaviors that would reduce the time to process all the paper. I created documents describing how I would change the system and provided them to my supervisor in a hope to improve the process. My supervisor passed my suggestions to our IT

deparment for consideration, which earned me an offer to stop doing data entry and start analyzing problems and creating specifications for programmers to change things.

This was a life changing opportunity, and I dove into it. My new team sent me from department to department evaluating processes and looking for ways to improve things. My job was starting to turn into a career, but I still wasn’t quite satisfied. Seeing programmers turn my designs into solutions reminded me of my days as a child trying to write my own software, and I felt a compulsion to take the next step and learn to write programs myself. I purchased a series of books on how to program, and every night after work I would progress lesson-by- lesson through a new language—Microsoft’s Visual Basic. Even beyond learning from books, I sought to prove myself by taking Microsoft’s tests and certifying myself as true Solution Developer. After a few months of dedicated I effort, I achieved my goal and was able to transition at work from an analyst to a programmer.

For the next decade I developed solutions to business problems by writing code and finally had a true career that I thoroughly enjoyed. My journey took me through many odd jobs and unfulfilling attempts, but it began back with the enjoyment I had with a TI-99.

The Solution was Coding

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY