About this time last year I spent some time reading these blogs here. It turned out to be a quite useful resource not only for “meeting” people from Southampton, but also getting a better overview of the course itself. Reading personal experiences may convey more information than the formal syllabus, which is abstract and does not tell the whole story (of course, I’m not saying these blogs do). Seeing how people feel about the course, the city and fellow students draws a bit more accurate picture than the marketing-flavoured statements on the website.<\/p>\n
So I plan to describe my hopes and expectations and reflect on how the university and my personal performance live up to those expectations. Even if I end up being the only person to read this blog (besides Joyce of course, who has to make sure I’m not being naughty in this public channel), it will still be a great way to see how my attitude and understanding has shifted over time. And I do expect them to shift, otherwise it’s a big waste of time.<\/p>\n
A few words about myself. I graduated college in 2008 in Estonia, went to the University of Tartu to study semiotics, only to find one and a half years later that I really ought to be doing computer science, as I was spending quite a fair amount of my time programming. The programme in Tartu was quite interesting actually, but other interests won. I am a web developer, so I do anything from from HTML to basic system administration. If it was my choice, I would spend all my time doing back-end development with Ruby, which is a language I have learned to love.<\/p>\n
Thankfully Ruby was not my first programming language, so I learned that there can be a huge difference in productivity depending on which toolset you use to get the job done. Therefore I’m constantly challenging my current toolbox, which means learning as many languages and techniques as I can, to be able to make the right choice for any given task.<\/p>\n
This search for The Perfect Tool means I will have some opinions that will collide with others’. In the next post I will share some of those, which will hopefully raise some eyebrows (or frowns) and scare away the rest of my potential readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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