Since this is my first blog, I suppose I should introduce myself. I’m Garrett Martin - a nineteen year old computer science student from Pelham, New York. I created this blog in an attempt to contribute to the programming community by writing what I learn. It also wouldn’t hurt to improve my writing skills along the way.

In order to explain how I got here, we’ll have to go back to November 2012. At the time, I was in my first semester of freshman year at Christopher Newport University, a relatively small liberal arts school in southern Virginia. Like most freshman, I had no idea what the hell I was going to do with my life(though I’m not pretending I do now. I just have a better idea.) It didn’t make the sitation any better that my Dad sent me an e-mail a week linking to one article or another that spoke of the gravity of the current job situation and other scary things that a college student wouldn’t want to hear.

One day after class, I came back to my room to see another email from my Dad. To my surprise, it wasn’t some article forecasting a grim future for me and my peers, but it was a link to a site called CodeAcademy. He told me to give it a try and that people who could program would always be able to have a job. So I began doing excercises - basic “Hello, world!” type stuff. I thought to myself, “This is kinda boring.” But as the difficulty and complexity of the tasks began to increase, I started to have fun. It was like a puzzle. I was fascinated with how I could manipulate my computer like I never could before. I was hooked.

By the time the spring rolled around, I had grown out of CodeAcademy, and sought out a more difficult challenge. Over spring break, I enrolled in the Tealeaf Academy, an online Ruby on Rails course. Immediately, we were challenged with many new concepts and assigments, including a blackjack game(which would be our final project) The course challenged me to think like I never had before and I found that it taught me more than I had learned in the entire year I spent at school.

I find myself now participating in the third and final course at Tealeaf Academy and working as a web development and programming intern at ALLDAYEVERYDAY, a marketing company in the lower East side of Manhattan.