My experience with programming

Wed Sep 09 2026

5 mins

Who am I?

As you probably have seen on this blog, my name’s Eric! I am a computer engineering student who wants to build my life around programming and understanding how computers work. In this blog post, I want to tell you about my journey of how I discovered programming and how I began to love computers.

First contact with programming

When I was in the 7th grade, I started attending programming courses at a nearby school called Logiscool. There, I started developing games in JavaScript using their special platform. These courses started my appetite for webdev, because I really liked JavaScript at the time.

First coding passion - web development

Intrigued by what I could do with JavaScript outside the game platform, I discovered webdev. I started learning on Udemy after I bought Jonas Schmedtmann’s courses. I quickly found out I couldn’t use JavaScript without HTML and CSS. So, I started learning those while making some crappy websites using HTML and CSS, thinking I was a design genius :)).

After this, I fell into tutorial hell by watching endless tutorials on JavaScript frameworks such as ReactJS, NextJS, AstroJS, etc. During this time, I started a lot of unfinished projects that are now archived on my GitHub. I continued this passion in high school, but in the 11th grade, I slowly gave it up because I needed to start studying for the entrance exam for university and the baccalaureate exam.

Current interests and my experience in uni so far

After high school, I started my journey as a Computer Engineering student at the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. Uni completely shifted my perspective! While I still have a soft spot for web development, my coursework introduced me to the fascinating world of low-level programming and data structures.

I absolutely loved courses like Operating Systems and Computer Organization & Assembly Language, even earning academic distinction awards as a top performer in them. I also took a dive into networking by completing my CCNA 1 certification.

This newfound passion for how things work under the hood led me to build several low-level projects. I engineered an Inverted Index Search Engine in C from scratch using hash maps and tries, and developed an Emergency Logistics Management System that uses priority queues to simulate handling 112 calls. I also challenged myself to build a custom C image editor for core transformations and an analytical football game predictor in Python based on team statistics.

Looking ahead, I’m super excited to be an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for the Introduction to Operating Systems course. It’s been an amazing ride so far!