After 4 years of being an IT student it is ironic that this will be my first article regarding my field of choice. Yet I feel the time is right to write and share.
What does it mean to be an IT student? Many of aspire to be the next Zucherberg or Bill Gates, most of us are dreamers. Dreamers that believe an idea can change the world. After all those stories of kids out of college that make it big are the norm in the IT sector. The Entrepreneurial spirit, that’s what they give us!
The field of IT is a unique field because it must match two fields of thought that are regarded generally contradictory. I of course am referring to ”creativity” and ”logic”.
The basis of Technology is 1 AND O, true or false, no middle ground, to paraphrase master Yoda ” you either do or do not, there is no try”, based on sound logic and strict rules you’d think IT would be a dull subject, but there’s so much more than the eyes can reveal.
The application of ideas, the communications of thought, the tricks the loop holes, the magnitude of Technology is flabbergasting. Think about it? How realistic are the new games that arrive on your PCs? How much of color and contrast must you know, calligraphy, letter-spacing, word-spacing, the play of colors all in their essence artistic and yet when it comes to their applications it’s determined by X and Y co-ordinates all of this incorporated to just design a single web-page!!!
No other field I would dare say is so Omni-present, from the world of science to the world of the film maker. From broadcasting the Oscars to going into depths of the seas! It’s a huge undertaking and easy to be overwhelmed by it all.
Now i’d like to take a u turn and comment on Nepali Students. How do we learn?? If we cover the uni-basics we’re not even covering thre basics (fact of life) an IT student can’t rely on textbooks, it’s an ever evolving world. PHP has gone from OOP to MVC to MVC Frameworks in a matter of 2 years and our curriculum only still covers database connectivity and calls it web tech! This forces you to be introspective to figure what you truly want to do. You can’t be a jack of all trades, no, you have to put yourself on a boat and make that journey.
Search and Search and research is a continual process if you want to succeed you have to be an addict(addicted to IT) no ifs buts or maybes! You have to love it, there are more lines of code to be hacked then there are genomes in the human body(not an actual fact but probably true) you’ll be harried by the lack of useful information annoyed by the difference of opinions of ”IT Professionals” and lack of quality resources that don’t cost you crazy amount of money (nothing worth having is free not even in the digital world)
I’d like to share my current experiences, a few weeks ago before the time of my writing this article; I would’ve considered myself fluent in the language of PHP now I am eating humble pie
A lot has been going on. Sun Microsystems was bought by ORACLE in 2010, Oracle now own Mysql and facebook and google are moving toward something called MariaDB. Now what am i supposed to do now? Should I switch from my beloved MySQL and move to MariaDB? Brace yourselves any newbies reading this post there are no “concrete” answers the field of IT is like the mythical creature of Greek fiction the “HYDRA” yes i’m happy with that analogy, why? let me explain the hydra is a creature that if you cut off one head two others rise to take it’s place!
So if you choose PHP as your language of choice then comes the question of IDEs, then the question of which framework, then the question of which database questions after questions after questions a succession of questions! With no inherently right answers.
Yet like the Hero Hercules who overcame his 10 challenges. If you overcome these “Herculian” challenges there is light at the end of the tunnel! A silver lining in the clouds.
I tell you my friends, be prepared stay hungry stay foolish, the future is ours! At least that is what I believe
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