A little bit about me part 1

Hi, I'm Hunter Hicks, and I'm a Software Engineer. I wanted to dive into some more exciting projects and posts but I figured some background information about me was warranted. Full disclosure, most of this isn't going to be interesting, but I thought I'd share it anyway to be thorough. I'll take you on a journey through what little programming and software engineering experience I have.

Note: I originally intended this post to be a full bio but, as usual, I started yappin' and it got extremely long. So now I'm going to break it up into a trilogy. This post will only cover my first experience programming. The next post will cover my college years, and the last post will go over the last year or so of my life. Enjoy!

My first programming experience

I feel like we all hear stories in our undergrad classes of that one kid who's been programming since they could read and wrote their own compiler by freshman year of highschool. I was not one of those kids. I didn't even start programming until my senior year in highschool, and not in a "real" language until I started college (Note: people often use the term "real" language to put down other programming languages, I however mean it in the literal sense).

My senior year of highschool I started one of my highschool's two AP classes (rural school): Calculus. When I started the class, we were advised to purchase a graphing calculator, so I picked up a Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus CE (how original). Shortly after getting the calculator, our teacher shared a couple useful programs with us. This opened my eyes to the world of programming. Yes, my first exposure to the world of programming was through my calculator.

My first foray into calculator programming came when one of the programs that had been distributed by my teacher encountered an error. With absolutely no knowledge of TI-BASIC or even the fundamentals of programming, I took it upon myself to fix the problem. After many hours of trial and error during lulls in my classes, I found and fixed the problem. I then distributed the new program to my classmates and my teacher. I won't lie, fixing that bug felt good, really good. I was hooked.

From there, I began creating program after program for every minor inconvenience I encountered in my classes. Can't be bothered to type out the quadratic formula? New program. Need to calcute the volume of a solid (sphere, cube, cone, cylinder, etc.)? New program. Need to be able to use any of the gas laws to solve questions on your upcoming chemistry test but spent all your time the previous week writing calculator programs for anything and everything and now you don't have time to memorize the gas laws before the exam? New. Program.

One of my most prolific programs was for calculating the grade you need on your final exam to get your desired grade in the class. This one was relatively simple since the school used (and still uses) a standard final exam weighting for all classes. I distributed this program to anyone with a graphing calculator. I'll never forget when one of my classmates asked my why his calculator told him "Sorry bud" after using the program. I had forgotten that I had made the program apologize to the user if the grade they needed on the final was higher than 100%. I thought it was hilarious, my classmate was not very amused. Last I heard, this program is still used and passed around by the students.

All in all, it was a decent exposure to programming I think. But I had no clue what was coming for me soon.

What I learned as a calculator programmer

Overall, I learned some valuable lessons and picked up some major bad habits that I'll try to summaraize here.

The good:

• Programming in general: I feel this one is self explanatory.


• Roughing it (no debugger or documentation): You have to realize, I was writing these programs during my free time in school. I didn't have access to a computer to look things up. It was pure trial and error.


• Modules: Long before I knew what they were, I was writing frequently used pieces of code to their own programs so that they could be called from one line in other programs. I thought nothing of it at the time but looking back, it's cool to see that I developed that without being taught.

The bad:

• Variable names: In TI-BASIC, variables are a single letter. For this reason, when writing a program, the first variable I assigned was "A", then "B", then "C" and so on. I just got used to keeping track of what letters were what in my head. This translated very poorly into writing "big boy" programs in Python for college. Anybody who was working with me would have absolutely no clue what was happening in my code because my variable names were not descriptive at all and followed the exact same convention I used for TI-BASIC programs. After some adjustment, I soon learned the beauty of descriptive variable names.


• Making me feel like a programmer: This may sound odd, but one of the reasons that I attribute to my not doing any "real" programming until I started college is my experience with my calculator. Up to that point in my life, I knew I wanted to be a software engineer but had no clue where to start or what to learn. When I started writing programs on my calculator, I was satisfied. I stopped my journey into programming as a whole because I was so focused o being the best calculator programmer around. I feel that if I had not had my experience with my calculator, I would've pushed further into the rabbit hole and been able to start college with some actual programming experience.