My tech learnings over the years

I have been into programming and tech from the age of 15, thanks be to my father! Initially, I got into it, only because my father told me to(isn’t that how we are all in India? :)) but after a while, it became quite an obsession. Programming, unlike other subjects and interests, is a subject which will definitely make you think and give your grey cells some work to do!(and that is good for your brain, right? :))

BASIC programming language:

BASIC or ‘Beginner’s All purpose symbolic instruction code) was the first programming language that was taught to us those days. It went like this:

10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD’

20 END

These statements print the phrase “Hello World” to the screen.

BASIC was a relatively simple language which introduced the concepts of looping, arrays and data types.

‘C’ programming language:

In a few years, as I stepped into college, I was coding these lines:

#include<stdio.h>

void main(){

printf(“Hello World”);

}

What is this? This is the ‘C’ programming language which was  developed in 1972 by Dennis M. Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and which prints the same message “Hello World” but in a different language now!

JAVA:

The ‘Java’ programming language opened its doors in 1995 and it was a rage for all of us then. I grabbed it with all my might and self-studied all the concepts thoroughly.

public class helloworld{

public static void main (String args[]){

System.out.println(” Hello World\n”);

}

}

are the lines which prints the same message “Hello World” to the screen using the Java programming language! 🙂

I had also got my hands dirty with databases like Oracle and operating systems like UNIX.

By the 90s and 2000s, many computer languages, databases took shape for a variety of reasons. Some of them were Visual Basic, Visual C++, Fortran, Pascal, C++ and a whole lot more… I think I dabbled in most of the above mentioned languages! 🙂 Each one of them was super fun to learn and very unique.

Widespread use of Internet:

Even though the Internet was born in the 1960s , its use was more widespread only in the late 90s and early 2000s. The Internet necessitated the creation of new programming languages.

Many businesses were also born because of the Internet. Can you imagine life without social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube today? Well, they will cease to exist if there was no Internet. Can you guess the common point among all these social media platforms? Well, they are all written in some programming language or other.

Google’s backend is written in C, C++, Go, Java, Python, Node and front end is written in JavaScript, TypeScript.

Facebook’s backend is written in Hack, PHP (HHVM), Python, C++, Java, Erlang, D,XHP, Haskell and front end is written in MariaDB, MySQL, HBase, Cassandra.

Social media marketing, Data analytics(studying the huge amount of data generated by social media platforms), Information security (securing the data and assets), Cloud security, blockchain have all evolved with the passage of time.

Takeaways:

From a humble beginning in BASIC, I have seen a lot in the tech world(and in spite of not involved directly in it for about 5- 7 years) Everything changes with time but not the speed at which ‘Technology’ changes. ‘Technology’ is a highly, highly volatile field.

One may think that the language and technology that you learn today will be THE most permanent language/technology in the world. But lo and behold, there is a new tech revolution every few months and new tech buzzwords to learn as time evolves! Both hardware and software undergo a sea of transformation even in a span of 5 years.

The key I have learnt is to re-skill, up-skill continuously with all our heart and adapt and learn as time moves on!

What will be the next tech revolution and how will you roll with it? 🙂

Hope you all have a technologically superb day!! 🙂

This post is for alphabet ‘L’ for #BlogchatterA2Z by @Blogchatter