Getting familiar with IT

So, the saga continues but in this galaxy. Today I would like to share with you how my relationship with IT stuff started and how it evolved. Those who read my previous articles (1, 2, and 3), may have a good picture of my background now. For those who are here for the first time, to sum it up: I do not have an IT background so, if you have one instead, most likely you will feel tempted to judge, and… that’s simply okay.

As a kid, I was given a Commodore 64 PC (yep, that one) where I could play a couple of games but the fascination for programming did not kick in. Then my dad got us (my sister and I) a flashy desktop PC, a Pentium clone, with a CD player. It got more interesting and since Internet was still just a word, I had time to tinker with my Windows 95 based skills. After a while Internet came and nothing was quite much the same. Only then I attempted a few “Hello world” scripts but I did not follow up, I think it was some Basic.

I spent most of my teenage afternoon amassing monstrous amounts of mp3s while enjoying the catalog skills of iTunes (is that even a thing?!). Then I discovered Suse Linux and then Red Hat Linux and, in those days, it was hard to install, configure and avoid disaster – especially if no one was teaching you how. In the meantime, I developed a profound sense for troubleshooting: hard drives, RAM, file systems, and operating systems. I can say proudly that once I had to fix the PC of the local pharmacy store: as a kid it was a small, good feat.

All the above to say this: I love tinkering around, dismantling things, and fixing stuff. I have been doing that for quite a long time.

Then came Python, I read about it in the Economist. A guy was sharing how, without any proper IT background, was able to create a simple user interface to do this and that, it was not super easy, but it wasn’t that hard either. Python was getting popular at that time, and I decided to study it, it could turn out to be useful at work I told myself: and it did.

For SQL it was a little bit different. SQL, for those of you who don’t know, stands for Structured Query Language, it was introduced in the 70s and is still quite popular today, it’s used for databases of every possible size. At work I was given a rather intriguing task: run an automation that would extract data and generate a report, all inside a mysterious tool called SPSS Modeler.

Only because the automation above was getting slower and slower, one day after another, I decided to invest some of my time into improving it and that’s how I discovered that I was using a SQL query, a rather simple one, to get data from a database’s table. I decided to rewrite it from scratch and that’s how the automation got faster, crazy faster (seconds instead of a lot of minutes). Google helped a lot, but it was easy to start with SQL and it got sweeter over time, eventually. Then I discovered that the mysterious tool I was given could handle, in a rather complex way, Python. Following the guide provided with the tool (I didn’t know then, but it was my first API documentation read) and my rather basic knowledge I started crafting basic automations for data extraction, transformation, and refinement, also known today as data pipelines (I know, it’s way more complex than that…).

These skills helped me a lot over time: I was able to change my job role and change the company as well. I am far from perfection, but I demonstrated to myself that if you are facing the challenge, you keep an open mind, and you are willing to learn something new along the way, only two things can stop you: a harsh self-judgment (ego, as they say, is your worst enemy) and/or a very bad management. The way you judge yourself, in my experience, derives from that famous imposter syndrome. But guess what, many people have a journey just like yours and IT is still a thriving community of nerds, where noobs are welcomed.

Today, if you are not afraid of using AI tools like #ChatGPT or its sibling #BingAI, it’s super easy to start your learning journey about just anything out there, especially programming. Good for a start, not so good for replacing your creativity, or not just yet. In the recent past, I also enjoyed structured courses about data science on #Coursera or the small, more curated, courses by M?sra Turp . Python is a great versatile language for data, it can help you reach quick successes which I think can be helpful when you are learning. Python is also used for server-side deployments, keep that in mind. You can find also courses about SQL around but creating queries, and optimizing existing ones at work, with huge databases in your hands, proved to be the best learning experience for me.

Let me know your thoughts about this, and share your journey if you like.

See you next week.