Liam Boston

Background

About Liam Boston

I love programming, but that love took a long time to develop. Way-back-when in the infancy of my programming journey, I took a class called AP Computer Science. Pressured by friends, I took the class without any experience, instilled with a false sense of confidence about "how easy" it would be. What a cruel, cruel joke. I remember spending over 8 hours on each assignment, debugging line-by-line with paper and pencil, writing the same program over and over to retain the material. The tests were like pulling teeth. I'd start studying weeks in advance to get consistent C's and barely hold a passing grade. The worst part is, I was trying so hard to learn the material. I wanted to be good at programming it just never came naturally. Now, after years of programming and lots of practice, I can say Java is my favorite language. I've learned object-oriented programming, data structures, run-time analysis, and design frameworks like model-view-controller. Concepts that I, in turn, help teach as a learning assistant in a Java Object-Oriented Design class. Now, that's not to say I know everything there is to know, far from it. I'm still learning, and I still get stuck - sometimes more often than I'd like to admit - but that's half the fun. Peeling yourself away from the screen, lying awake at night, struggling to come up with a solution before finally having that "Ah-HA!" moment is something I've become all too familiar with. Of course, Java isn't the end all be all of programming either. In my time at Penn State, I've picked up a few things along the way. I learned Python while helping friends in the computer science program with homework. A web framework called Django and a JavaScript library called ReactJS while working on a project as a research assistant. I've even dabbled in mobile app development, working with a UI framework called Flutter on a family counseling app. All these different languages, and yet I've only begun to scratch the surface of what programming has to offer. I can't wait to continue learning anything and everything that comes with a life of programming.