The Origin of i

30 Aug 2018

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For as long as I can remember I have been playing video games on the PC. From the days of Doom to even today. My first recollection of playing a game on the PC was a kids game designed to practice your arithmetic. My Dad had bought it for me as a way to learn how to add and subtract quickly.I thought it was the most entertaining thing in the world, of course I didn’t know of anything else at the time. However, over the years I’ve played a lot of various video games on the PC, most of them were RPGs or Role Playing Games. Most of the time these games required a great deal of time to progress in the game. I found that the most time consuming activity was harvesting resources or “farming”.

As I was playing these games I wondered if there was an easier way to keep track of the materials I needed and the ones I had. Keeping track manually in a excel spreadsheet is not the most entertaining task in the world. So I began to learn how to make scripts in order to make the “farming” process more autonomous. Eventually, I reached a point where I began to wonder if there was an easier and neater way to run my scripts and keep them all in one place. This lead me to learning about user interfaces and a desire to learn how to make easily usable programs.

I always knew that I wanted to do computer programming and possibly even game design. However, I found that learning how to make programs that people can use to make life simpler is far more interesting and rewarding than just making video games. Software design may not have been the most obvious tangent to take and I certainly never anticipated that my desire to be as lazy as possible would drive me in this direction. Of course, I know that software design is much more than sticking scripts together. However, I believe that at its core, software design is about being able to make a program everyone can use in order to simplify an otherwise time consuming task in there life.