A story, good or bad, starts somewhere. Here's mine. This blog is about me, Kathleen Franz, and my programming history, so I'd say that story started over 15 years ago, when I learned the basics of front-end and back-end coding.
When I lived in Germany for 4 years, not only was I able to learn the culture, language, and history of such a beautiful country. I was also able to attend Makromedia Akademie where I started my programming journey. It was probably at the height of Macromedia's rise in gaming, animation, programming fame with ActionScript and timelines, which made it all the more glorious for me to learn from them. They taught us front-end and back-end coding basics, with our end project being an e-commerce website. Thrilling! At that point I knew I was hooked.
In early 2000s, I moved to the San Francsico Bay Area with my husband and knew I wanted to get into a job programming something. I started doing some front-end work with pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (okay, jQuery for more spice), but realized very quickly that browsers hated standardization of display elements which drove me batty to no end. If I code something, it shouldn't be tailored to one browser/platform. It needs to work universally - if possible.
Around 2005, I was given the opportunity, with my then employer, to dig deep into the Java world. At night, I took classes at a community college to learn everything I could about Java, and during the day, I was able to flex that knowledge into a live codebase. Connecting with databases, coding robust workflows, collecting data and delivering feedback to a UI (that I didn't have to worry about, ha!)....it was pure love. I found my passion - besides logic puzzles!
Since then, I have worked a few years with SharePoint, C#, shell scripting, but its Java that I've come to really enjoy. Why? It is platform-independent. As long as the server has a JVM, you're good to go! And Java is a constantly growing beast - programmers are constantly creating/upgrading plugins to allow Java to do more, for example machine learning, database connectivity, 3D, UI, concurrency, REST APIs, etc. There is so much available its mind-boggling!
So here we are in the present. I've had some wonderful experiences in my programming history, with some incredible employers, and the people who've interacted with me at every level. I could not be where I am today without them. I'd like to further pursue this Java programming career, and learning a lot more in the process - good and bad. I believe it's what makes a more resilient programmer and person.