Why I used to hate computer science?

You see, I always hated computers before choosing to become a software engineer. At least that is what I used to think.

When we start pretending to do or to be or to hate someone or something, our mind tricks us into believing that that is what we actually feel. That thinking in such a way is the only option we had. But it's not true.

Reality makes it's own way into the most unreachable places, because all places are trapped within reality itself. Even the reality of something not being real, is a fact that exists, thus the truth never hides.

When I sat down one day to trace back the moment that I had decided computers were not my thing, I was surprised to recall memories of me being in love with computers since I was a kid. I had only started to hate computers after grade 7. And thankfully enough, I was able to figure out what led me to hate these amazing inventions so much.

Back until 7th grade, I used to love gaming. I was pretty good with Call of Duty, GTA San Andreas, Man Hunt 2, Hitman 2, Counter Strike, and a bunch of online games on miniclip. Yet even more fascinating for me was the power of the developer who had written the game. Imagine for a second, being in control of a world where you write down how the streets are made, how a city is designed, how high a player can jump, what ability a certain species or race can choose. Having the master key in a world of your creation is a god like feeling which although was too young to imagine, could still barely catch wind of. And so I decided that a game developer I would become. There was only 1 problem. I had no idea how to start, who to ask and what to study. In 7th grade, Computer science isn't really a subject, It's a classroom full of bulls@*t, where children of the 21st century are being taught,

"Claaaaasssss, this right here is MS Excel, as you may have seen on your fathers computer. It's the best math tool as a software".

"Really, education system?". How do you expect a 7th grader to be amused by an empty grid offering more math classes?

So it never struck me to ask my IT teacher about gaming.

Until-

grade 7 also happened to be the first year of middle school and clubs was a new thing. Half of the boys being boys went straight into the sports club because why not. Then there were other clubs like, the Mathematics club, the literary club, the art club, the humanitarian club, and yes the IT Club. All the teachers who were heads of there respective clubs came on the stage during the assembly, and introduced their club and themselves. And guess what the head teacher of the IT club said.

"Students, the world of IT is filled with wonderful technologies like robots, and flying cars(lol she was selling) etc. etc... and we shall teach you how to make mobile games."

So in my head, her voice echoed like they show in the movies,

"we shall teach you how to make mobile games, teach you how to make mobile games, make mobile games,..."

So I raised my hand and asked once again just to confirm, because otherwise I'd have to miss out on the literary club.

"Miss is it true that we will learn how to make mobile games?".

"Well yes".(Well yes but actually no)

…and so every Wednesday I used to sit on the computer lab floor with 60 other kids waiting that one day she'll start, and every Wednesday for the first few Wednesdays the graph went up. Then there was a peak, and soon followed the inevitable decline in interest. IT was a subject that had failed me.

Our teacher never told us that programming languages existed, and I kept thinking that all and every software in the world was written in binary. So every time I used to imaging a software working on the backend, I visualized something like this:

0110101100100101000001010100101011011010000101011011101110101110000101010101011010010101010111011101000011010110101101010100000101101010101011011011010101010110011110001011011101101111101001101111111111001111101000000101001011011010101010

And before I knew it, computer science seemed like a waste of time. I grew further and further away from it when I took biology as my O-level elective over computer science, and Biology is by the way, an AMAZING subject, so I took math and biology both during A-levels. I then decided to become a doctor, because boy is biology so interesting and amazing and used to be one of my favorite subjects. Even today it's my second favorite.

I could not become a doctor, because I chose not to. I chose to peruse any interesting engineering field instead, because of a reason I'll tell you later onwards in another post some other time, and I hope you stick around and subscribe to this website for more interesting blogs. You can also submit your email below and get notified every time I post nice things or rants, I don't know what'll come next. Lets both wait a bit and find out. See you in the next post.

Oh and quick lesson learned from this,

Never judge something by the person or affiliation that represents it, because then we are only copy pasting our impression of one thing onto another. If a salesperson from an art store should talk rudely to us, we cannot establish that the art in the store is not impressive. The customer service may be, but the art deserves it's own critique.

Thankyou

Hamza Khan