Computer science has become a second nature to me, I had been developing websites for 3 years using PHP, MySQL in the summer of 2010 when my father came up to me and asked my advice for developing a full fledged website to help his business flourish. My father runs a local newspaper with focus on advertising, he wanted his website to reflect upon the coming of modern age, he wanted it to stand out from the competition and he wanted it to be one of a kind.
I took it upon myself to develop the website from scratch, not only because it was my father's business, but also because I deemed it to be an excellent opportunity. I had decided to take help from existing projects only in areas where it made the most sense, for the rest I chose to do it myself. I had decided that I'll try to learn and use as many newer technologies as I could without risking the entire project.
The site itself was nothing short of complex, not only was it meant to handle online display of the newspaper, it also needed to handle his advertisement bookings, finances and accounting statistics. Not only was this the biggest project I had undertaken, it was also the most complex and required experience in accounting and statistics that I had no previous knowledge of. Yet, I didn't waver, I learned as much as I could about these fields and applied my learning.
For the site itself, I incorporated the best techniques I could find, learning new things every day and improving upon my old concepts. For example, I had very little experience in Object Oriented Programming (OOP) before but I went on to apply full OOP, reading countless articles, books and guides about the best practices. Another area that I focussed on was the user experience, the site was to contain complex areas and I had to make them appear as simple as I could. So I again went back to the basics, researching and studying as much as I could in order to come up with the best experience that I could.
A few months, very many sleepless nights, countless hours of studying in accounting, programming, user experience, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and a few other topics, later I had come up with a site that worked, that not only provided the function but also had the form to appeal to users. In no way was the site finished, since it was, is and will always be an ever improving process, but it proved to be a very big part of my life. It gave me the confidence to pursue bigger dreams, projects and targets and to push myself into learning newer things and made me truly believe in my choice of Computer Science as my career.
(The entire content above is in my essay, including the PS)
