Speech for public speaking course.

It’s funny because I was reading our textbook and chapter 1 talks about thinking positively about public speaking. It mentions that for every negative thought you should have several countering positive thoughts. One of the positive thoughts it used as an example is you are given a chance to share your ideas with others. I thought it’s oh boy this is horrible because I get a chance to torture my audience with an idea of what I think is exciting. It’s what I enjoy, it’s what I always think about, its’ what I dream about. I am passionate about programming.

My love/hate relationship with programming, love/hate because when something doesn’t work I become very agitated, started when I was actually 12. The blockbuster hit movie Hackers had been out for about a year and when I saw it for the first time I thought it was the coolest thing ever. So being the 12 year old I am at the time I want to emulate these people and I just happened to have a C programming book sitting around. So here I was 12 years old carrying this humongous C programming book with me every day to school so I can read it on the bus.

Now my personal attachment to programming comes from the fact that I love problem solving. I like puzzles, and that is what programming provides… is an endless array of puzzles. When I was a developer everyday there was a new puzzle laid out in front of me. You take these puzzles with you as you go home, you don’t ever stop thinking about them. It’s always in your mind, how you can make this better, how can you make this faster, how can you make this more practical. I can remember thinking about a problem for 3 days before actually typing any code for it which ended up being relatively short. For the first time in my life I had felt like my hunger for puzzles was satisfied.

What programming is to me is a method for expressing ideas in a logical and mathematical way. Look at modern day video games where programmers are continuously trying got get games to be as real as possible, and they are doing this by interpreting our laws of physics into machine code. For many the ultimate goal is to interpret reality it’s self, others just enjoy it for more creative aspects. Like analyzing and recreating the fractal patterns in Pollock’s paintings.

Everyone has their own goal but one thing is clear. Just as an artist uses a brush to express his thoughts and ideas on canvas, we do the same in machine code through programming.