Computer Science education phase

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription – I want to break up the course a little bit and tell you about my own journey so that maybe you can relate and maybe you can think I'm silly or who knows what you'll think but I'll just kind of it won't take long and I'll tell you how I got here so I went to college computer science at San Jose State University reputable computer science school my goal was just to be a software engineer I thought the coolest thing you can be he's a software engineer people think they're smart people think software engineers make stuff that's really cool and it's respectable and so that was good until I started studying this stuff and I realized oh I can actually make stuff I can make stuff come to life and I don't have to make physical things because those things are really hard I can make software and then after that I was like oh I can make any idea I have almost and then I was like am I crazy why isn't everybody else doing the same thing like what's like you know like I would have an idea and it would just drive me crazy like how I would want to build it and then everybody else would be like yeah good idea I'm moving on with my life and I'm like no no no no build it build it build it and they're like no it's okay and I'm like what are you talking how can that be so it was too frustrating for me personally not to work on my own ideas it was it was driving me crazy I was like how came to other people leave it alone and so I wanted to do it and I started building little things here and there but I had no business clue any idea I had I had no tools with which to evaluate its quality in terms of a business and my first idea I'll tell you what it was I still loved it but it turned out not to be the best business I was taking data structures courses in computer science and we were learning about trees and maps data structures and then I went to one of my elective courses philosophy I really loved philosophy and we were learning about Socratic dialogues and if you know anything about Socratic dialogues it's basically you know it's a dialogue it's written in in it's a philosophy but it's written in terms of dialogue and what I found was that the underlying structure of a dialogue is very similar to the underlying structure of a tree because you kind of traverse a dialogue essentially traverses a tree you don't have to get into the specifics of it but the idea was I realized oh my god I can program the dialogues and I can make the computer have a dialogue with the person just like the philosophers did and we can always come to the philosophical conclusions but I can give the philosophy to the masses because I can make the computer do this with people they don't have to read boring philosophy books and I actually built it I literally mapped out the dialogues the Socratic dialogues I programmed it I built it but nobody really wanted to use it maybe people would have but I had no clue how to market it I had no clue how to position it how to pitch it and it sort of died in the confusion of it all like people just weren't sure how does this really benefit me how you know so I just didn't I could actually built it but it couldn't really move it forward so the idea died and I had to move on but that was really my first idea and I did actually bring it to life made no money but people you know three people used it okay that was my but it was a cool unique innovative idea that is totally my own and it helped me learn a couple of things like I had to understand hey how do you promote it I had to understand how will it make money in the end I had to start thinking through all these issues and guess what even then you know those are the issues around you know that remember the three centers business plan those are two of them and even the first one not creating a confusing business but actually the first sentence having a clear business stated that's really important so I did wasn't aware of this three centons business plan I was gonna come up with later but I really literally ran into all those issues back then so that's what happened in college in the next video I'll tell you what happened after college.