I feel like it's important to lay-out my computer and programming background to help people understand what knowledge I have going into this sort of thing. If much of what I present here is well over your head, you should know that going into this.
I grew up around computers. I'm 27 years old and I don't remember a time when there wasn't a computer in my home. So I'm not a stranger to the devices. In 10th grade I started building my own computers. Trust me, that's not nearly as hard as it sounds to many people out there. I'm confident I could teach someone to build their own computers in a week. They make it very easy to do these days. It's pretty much just plugging the pieces together. If something doesn't fit, then the part doesn't go there or needs to be turned around. Other than that, just read the manuals for the parts.
In January 2011, I became a Microsoft MVP for my contributions to the Windows Phone community. While most people who are MVPs have a deep technological background, I can't exactly say the same. Most of the work I did to become an MVP was in answering basic questions from the community about the then upcoming platform. This was stuff like how the OS worked, when it would be available, etc. Any cell phone enthusiast would be able to do the same if they wanted. I wasn't helping developers or anything. I was working with regular people.
As I mentioned in my first post, I do have some experience with programming. I understand concepts such as loops and if/then statements. But I haven't gotten significantly further than what's commonly called a "Hello World" app. That's an app that displays the words "Hello World" on the screen. I get the impression that my knowledge on the subject is similar to if all I knew about football was how the scoring worked and the difference between a pass play and run play. I've got the basics, but I'm not going to get hired as a coach any time soon. This lack of knowledge about programming can be seen in this blog. If I had a better knowledge about programming, I wouldn't be using blogger.com to create and run it.
I've attended a couple of conferences for programmers, but I felt like I was out of my depth most of the time. I saw potential to get where they were and where I was, but there was plenty of ground to cover. I guess the biggest thing I pulled from them was when they said "It's easy to..." I thought "Maybe for you!" However, I just said the same thing about building a computer in this very blog post. Maybe the gap between where I think I could be rather quickly and where they are isn't as big as I first thought.
Having grown up around computers (just about all of them ran either DOS or a version of Windows), I've known a lot of the basics since I was a little kid. I've been creating files, organizing folders, installing programs, and all that jazz since George H.W. Bush was in office. Not to be snooty, but I'm going to assume those following this blog can do the same. If not, you've got stuff you need to learn prior to getting into programming. If I didn't do that, then I'd bore the majority of people I believe would be interested in this with the extreme basics.
As far as my education background, I'm certified in secondary education in political science and speech. These are two fields that are completely different than computer science. So that means I understand the concepts behind teaching, but I don't really have the in-depth knowledge I would need to be certified in teaching computer science. But I'm hoping to leverage that fact to my advantage with this blog.
Well that's that. I'm hoping by understanding my background, you have an idea of what my starting point is on this venture. Where are you starting?
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