How I became a developer? (Part2)

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3 min read

How I became a developer? (Part2)

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In order to explore the digital world and know how the computer works, I started my undergraduate education in medical informatics. According to psychology wiki:

Health informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, computer science and health care. It deals with the resources, devices and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval and use of information in health and biomedicine.

You might be wondering why I didn’t choose computer science? Well…the truth was computer science was not the only thing that I was really into but also health care. I remember I asked my sister about what the tech guys did in the hospital because she worked there after graduating. I kept asking questions which were quite hard to answer, such as “how do the programs work to store the data in the database?” and “how do people upload their medical records to the system?”. What piqued my curiosity was how the doctors used information technology to examine the patients. Apparently, I didn’t get the answer from her in the end, because this wasn’t my sisters’ speciality, therefore I ended up finding the answer by myself.

To be honest, it wasn't an easy route to master both computer science and health care. Even though I had to pull many all-nighters or go through a lot of tough times, I still did it eventually and felt fulfilled and fruitful in the end.

At a later time, I didn't start my career in the hospital or healthcare industry, even though my expertise was in the health informatics area. The reason was that the technology in medical care was lagging behind. It was hard to grow quickly and to be able to learn a lot of sophisticated technology. It turns out the time I spent outside of the healthcare industry was worth it, I learned a lot about the full lifecycle of the software design process, including requirements definition, prototyping, proof of concept and object-oriented programming etc.

I feel like the knowledge I studied at school, more specifically an educational institution, was very different from the knowledge I learned in the corporation or open-source community. Institutionalized education normally provides a well-structured learning experience, so you do not only need to learn the courses you like but the courses you are not very into, not to mention the majority of the courses are about theory. However, the training you gain in the enterprise is mainly practical and work-related which I enjoyed most. I quite applaud the saying that, “the secret of learning is the desire to learn” - this is how you cultivate the skill, gain the ability and increase your knowledge. This was my journey towards becoming an excellent developer.

I hope you will find something useful through my journey and if you have any questions or feel that I kept something up my sleeve😉, feel free to email me or create issues here. I would love to share😄.

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