Hello there!

My name is Rosalie, as you have likely gathered already, and I am a complete newbie to the application development scene. This blog will primarily be a diary of sorts to track my progress as I learn throughout the course of my current internship within an application development team but also throughout my learning journey as a whole!

From the blog title, you can see why it's no wonder I'm entering uncharted waters here. For some background, my experience with technology was largely end-user and as a consumer. My earliest experience with coding in any sort was back in 2007 when Neopets enabled you to customise the HTML of your Petpage and was where I spent many a dedicated hour to tweaking the Blingee graphics around my favourite Neopet (Shout out to Peophin, a real one).

A real screenshot from my Petpage from when I last left it, likely back in 2011, with the theme base courtesy of SunnyNeo. This account was a new one at the time since my mum allowed us to make our own, although I suspect she was probably tired of the Neopets marketing clogging up her emails rather than being a Cool Mum. Looking at it now, for such an old account my stats are truly abysmal. I really considered myself a Neopets afficionado back then but now I've been given reason to doubt that.

To address the elephant in the room: YES, the Neopets are SAD and YES I feel REALLY BAD about that okay!!I The perils of not remembering your password and the shockingly slow email delivery for password recovery on the Neopets servers paired with my impatience means that this article is going up with sad Neopets. We're only human, okay.

Anyway, I never travelled far from HTML as once 2014 rolled around, I, like many other pimply preteens with a penchant for Doctor Who, gravitated to Tumblr.

Tumblr provided a much more robust HTML customisation environment which provided a lot more variables to customise and naturally, a lot more things to go wrong. Aside from my Tumblr blog being the main source of my coding experience, I also was exposed to - very briefly - C++ via Adobe Dreamweaver in the "Computer Class" 6-month curriculum of early high school. Nor did I make any leaps and bounds with my coding there, with the website I developed being entirely devoted to the BBC's 2010 production of Sherlock. Simpler times.

For the curious ones who'd like to see the Tumblr HTML editing environment: this is my current theme which is a very lightly modified version of the code provided by odeysseus.tumblr.com.

By then, my technology experience wrapped up and I developed an irrational fear of Microsoft Excel with my knowledge of coding languages going as far as "JavaScript is the one with the coffee loading icon". Upon joining Microsoft in 2019, my knowledge of computers and the infrastructure of computing was near nil but throughout my career, which was very conveniently timed with COVID-19, my world had opened up to technology. As a Trainer, I hosted youth coding sessions utilising JavaScript and block coding techniques (shout out to Minecraft Hour of Code!) which started to really simplify the idea of coding from something being completely daunting and insurmountable, to probably something I could learn!

Screenshot from the "Voyage Aquatic" Lesson Plan from Minecraft Hour of Code hosted by code.org. A simplified logic-oriented approach to coding with the ability to show the code blocks in pure JavaScript.

The work I did at Microsoft gave me incredible resources to develop my understanding of cloud architecture, automation, and application deployment. Not to mention, becoming the chosen tech support for anything Windows related by anyone within a 2-metre radius. While truly enjoying the end-user training capacity I was operating within, things did change by early 2023 with the "Great Layoffs" and I found myself far away from anything I wanted to really do. This spurred me into action in furthering my education and subsequently moving on to this exciting internship where I can finally plunge myself head-first into the world of application development.

Despite my enthusiasm, I am naturally petrified. As I mentioned earlier, this blog will act as a record of my learning experiences throughout this internship and my technology learning journey as a whole. So, you will bear witness to plenty of confusion and mistakes, but, hopefully, something that went well!

If you've read this far, thanks! Hopefully we'll see more of each other soon :).

Cheers!

- Rosalie

Cover image: Screenshot from HIRO@sea at Youtube.