Nắng Trong Vườn

About

Dzũng, who chooses to go by “Nắng Trong Vườn”, is an aspiring developer and a student at RMIT University.

I guess I started to code because I wanted to make something. I wanted to be known as a developer. Because it’s a hella cool job title. In tech forums, developers are special people. They are actively contributing to the advances of technology in their own way - be it making Facebook, YouTube, or simply some side projects.

I’m pretty sure I got inspired myself by an app called Pytaku. Pytaku was meant to be a distraction-free manga reader, free of all ads, banners that plague other manga reading sites. It is also the inspiration for Project Susurrus.

Pytaku is developed by another RMIT student, who I think have graduated by now, called nhanb. In his readme, he said that Pytaku was built with Google’s Appspot technology, which used Python, so that prompted me to learn Python as well.

I’ve meddled with technology for years. Born in a well-enough family, I’ve had access to many electronics in my childhood - PCs, laptops, gaming consoles, TVs, etc. But I have never touched code before.

I have always looked up to developers and coders. They make things happen - They create the things you use every day. All the mainstream apps like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc. are all made by developers. Your operating system was made by a team of coders. Stuff like that.

Of course, English wasn’t my first language, so I had to learn that, seeing as how Vietnamese documentations are rarely adequate enough. They either leave out important things, or just doesn’t cover it in an easy enough way to understand. Besides, code are mostly written in English anyway. I’m of the opinion that if you don’t have a good enough grasp on English, you’ll get lost somewhere along the way.

So I looked for ways to learn how to code. I stalked forums such as /r/learnprogramming, reading Stack Overflow like I understood it. But it didn’t work out really well. Coding is hard. Real hard. I tried online tutorials, like codeacademy and stuff. That didn’t turn out too well, either.

I always dropped a language when I got to the part that I didn’t understand. I gave up Java, C, Swift along the way. Mainly because, I guess I lacked the self-control to not drop them.

Then I met Mr. Seibert. He’s, kind of MIA at the moment, I guess? But he showed me a side of coding that I completely overlooked - the web development side of things. “Oh yeah, Pytaku was a web app too huh?”. That realization really changed a lot.

He got me to dabble in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. He showed me what web applications can do. How they are all the rage now, what with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter dominating everything. I became interested. I told myself - “I will now become a web developer.”.

And that’s how it all started, I guess. My coding journey’s still ongoing. I made what is a simple mock up of my future website. I made a rather simple clicky game. I’m still reading tutorials. I’m still struggling with jQuery everyday. But hey, that’s part of the fun, right?

In the future, I’ll become a developer. I’ll make Project Susurrus a real thing, so look forward to it. If I ever lose my way, I’ll look at this post. To remind me of how I started. To see how much I have progressed.

I’ll see you around later. Happy coding!