Inception

I am amazed. I just finished picking a template with a lovely blue hue and I already have had eight views. The web is a phenomenal and complex universe.

My about me page will give reader's more a background about myself, but I wanted to state my goal in the first post. I am about to graduate with a PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Utah and to put it bluntly my plan is to walk away from the Ivory Tower FOREVER (imagine Inception-like trumpets blaring). For real sound go to this link, http://inception.davepedu.com (there's a big red button you get to click on). It's not much of a plan yet, I know. However, in the world of academia this is a momental step. As many others have attested to, there are endless feelings of guilt associated with "quitting" academia. I will address "why I'm leaving academia" in a future post. Let's get back to the real reason for this paragraph. What am I doing with this blog. Quite simply, it's going to be a journal of my experience of switching careers into CS. Who is it for? I guess the primary recipient of my blog will be... Me! If you want to read what I have to say, go for it!

I realized though that perhaps I've already given away that I am a CS newbie just from my title. Some of the advice that I've received as an inchoate coder is that programmers are a dime a dozen (I think people are actually referring to coders and not programmers). Here's a couple of related articles, http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/software-developers-a-dime-a-dozen/ and http://www.computeruser.com/programmers-10-cents-a-dozen.html. I particularly like the statement in the second link, "True, for many it is too late to be undertaking a second degree in a new field of study, not to mention the drastic costs of post secondary education." Oh, oh, I'm in trouble :-). Any who, the advice that coders are a dime a dozen and in order to go beyond the basics of coding you need to have skills in advanced math and logic. While I believe this statement is true, I still like to imagine my friends saying this in a raspy voice reminiscent of one of the Scooby Doo villains. So my take home message is, I AM a novice programmer and I will continue to demonstrate this throughout my posts. So have a heart and remember this if I ever open this blog up to comments.