Why I decided to study Software Engineering
For the money, fame and popularity; obviously. Next question?
You never know though, maybe one day junior Software Engineers looking for inspiration and guidance will stumble across the very first blog of the great James Blaskett (the inventor of BlazScript) and so I should take this seriously. Shit. I’m not good at serious. The answer to this depends on how much time you have and whether you’re brave enough to enter my psyche, so let’s start at the start.
Hi, I’m James, and this is my first ever blog post in my nearly 40 years of life. Not that the internet has really been around all that time, I was in high school (around 95 or 96) when I first discovered it. My cousin and I for a time would write down every URL we saw on a piece of paper so that when we could get internet time in the school library we could look them all up. That was fun for a while as there weren’t a lot of websites out there, but we quickly learnt that most of them were actually quite boring, and the list got ridiculously long after a month or so.
Anyway, I’ve digressed in my first sentence. If you plan on reading anything I write, get used to that (oh, and also me putting things in brackets (occasionally double (and yes, even triple brackets (four is too many)))) aaaaand also run-on sentences (sorry not sorry). I’ll try and keep the digressions to a barely tolerable level, and get to the point. I grew up playing games on our MS Dos computer with an orange screen and less power than a modern calculator, and of course Atari and Nintendo (and Sega at my cousin’s house because they didn’t have Nintendo even though it was clearly better). I would never have been an e-sports contender if that was a thing back then (not now either), but I was always really quick to pick up games and beat my older siblings from a very young age. In fact, I was quick to pick up and master technology in general. That’s why my first thought when thinking about this question was my first year of high school, that was when I first had computer classes, and it just made sense. My memory is generally terrible, but way back then as 11 year olds we were doing very basic programming, making a box bounce around the screen and that sort of thing. And yes, you’ve heard this sort of thing before, but seeing the potential for all the things you might be able to do with programming was like a whole new world. Not the song from Aladdin, but hey, you know, a new fantastic point of view; no-one to tell us no or where to go; or say we’re only dreaming? Sure, that works.
I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to pursue it at that age, but in year 12 I studied 3D animation and LOOOOOVED that. Towards the end of the year the ABC were (was?) talking about offering some scholarships or internships or something along those lines for budding young 3D artists, but when they axed that initiative I just did what I thought the next logical step would be without doing any research or putting any actual thought into it. I went to uni and did a computer science degree. Or at least, I wish I did. I started a computer science degree. But this is where being a smart kid who wasn’t particularly motivated and really just wanted to stay home and play video games all day really kicked me.
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You see, for my first 12 years of school, I probably did homework about 5 times. I was smart enough that I generally just didn’t have to, I could get all my work done during class, even the advanced maths class that was only for the smartest kids in school. I got good enough marks to not get in trouble with the teachers, and good enough to get into uni. I was the youngest of four, and the way my mum tells it: all our report cards every term said the same thing “James (or other child) is very smart, but needs to apply him/herself more”. So that brings me to the kicking. Uni isn’t like high school (no shit, right?). There IS no class time, there are just dark lecture theatres with 300 people crammed into little chairs with stupid little folding tables that fall down with a loud bang and scatter your books everywhere when you fall asleep (always at least one person, every lecture). And then you go home and play video games, because that’s what you’ve always done after school.
I don’t know when I started speaking in the 2nd person, but my point is that I seriously just wasn’t prepared for uni, and had no idea what I’d got myself into. Even the actual programming we were learning, it was all on Linux or Unix (and what even is this windows rip-off?) and they were teaching us multiple languages at the same time (I wanna say; Python, Pascal and Java?). It was the most enjoyable part of uni, but I only lasted one semester before I realised I wasn’t going to make it. And so many times in my life have I wished I hadn’t.
So for the next half decade I worked, I played video games, I moved to Sydney, I played video games, I worked at Pizza Hut, I played video games, and I got a “real” job (some sort of mind-numbing yet somehow enjoyable manual data validation in an office that a monkey could do) at Sun Microsystems (you know, the company where the founder of Java worked? small world). I think I also squeezed in some time for some video games. After having a real job for a couple of years I decided that as much as I enjoyed it, it wasn’t really taking me places. I had no degree and it was time to change that. I moved to Melbourne and got a degree (for real this time) in 3D animation. But this was now the late noughties, these 3D and video game schools are a dime a dozen and the degree is next to worthless. The animation industry is very portfolio driven (as it should be), and while I breezed through most of my degree (because it’s fun and pretty and technical), I got through on my technical aptitude, not my artistic qualities (of which I have none).
If I really had the passion, I’m quite sure I could already have been working as an animator (or probably a technical animator or rigger) for a decade or so, but again, I kinda just wanted to stay at home and play video games. So with new degree in hand, I just repeated what I’d done when I moved to Sydney, but I did it in Melbourne.
When I met my wife I was working at Grill’d, and doing nothing else (unless FFXIV counts as something? No?). It was very clear very fast that A: we really like each other and B: my “career” was not going to be enough to keep her interested. So I did what I did in Sydney, and got a real job, whatever I could. I started working at Origin and 8 years later I’m married, we have a new house out in the suburbs and an absolutely amazing toddler. Life is good. Oh, except Origin just made my role redundant.
I very quickly realised that a redundancy after nearly 8 years is a very good thing. I hadn’t been very happy at work for a while anyway, and now I had options. I knew I could probably find a job. I’m smart and quick and charismatic to a certain point, and Origin had taught me how to navigate bureaucrapsy, sure I could get a job. But maybe, just maybe, they paid me enough that I can afford to stay unemployed for a little bit and do something REAL.
I googled, I soul searched, I took personality tests. Everything pointed in the same direction and here I am. So the short answer, is that it just didn’t make sense not to.
