First Lecture Thoughts

Being present in the classroom during the first lecture was for me like taking a long trip down memory lane. Back in 2006 I took a CCNA course, and we studied a lot about networking in my undergrad. The first lecture reminded me of how much I used to like that stuff while I was studying it as an undergrad student before graduating in 2006. It also reminded me of how much I started to hate that same stuff after I started working as a telecom engineer after graduation.

My previous job gave the utmost frustration. It is why I fell in love with software development as a refuge to run away to from that frustration, and it is why I'm currently here. The reason behind this frustration was that back in college we studied a lot of things, mathematics, electronics, antenna theories, propagation theories, all the analog and digital communication systems, and everything we studied was very much details and proofs and equations and everything. We used to use MATLAB to write simulations of a whole communications system, starting at the base-band data, passing by modulation, channel coding (for error correction), the communication channel itself (simulating different types of noise environments), and then ending at the receiving end where the demodulation and error correction take place. I was having fun, because it used to feel like I'm an actual engineer.

But once I started working at a 3G cell-phone network operator (or carrier as it's called here in the US) and I was shocked. None of that knowledge that I acquired at college is needed anymore. All we had to do is to operate the network and enhance our network's coverage all over the country. I felt I'm not an engineer anymore. Unfortunately, most of the knowledge I acquired as an undergrad started to get rusty! What a great loss that I keep regretting everyday.

I'm so glad now that I will get to remember a lot of the stuff I used to know, but from a different perspective. From the only perspective that I currently love and care about, that is the perspective of a programmer.

Looking forward to get deeper into the subject.