Hello, world!

Catarina Pedreira
2 min readDec 22, 2020

As a 22-year-old computer engineering student in my last year of college, I felt like this title would be appropriate for my first post.

I’ll provide some context for people out there who are not familiar with it — “Hello, world!” is the output of a very simple program (frequently a single line), often used to illustrate the syntax of a given programming language. It is usually also the first line of code that students write when entering the adventure of programming.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

I remember the first time I was introduced to programming. I was a senior in high-school and the course had a name that can be roughly translated to “Computer Applications”. For this course’s final project, the students (divided into groups) could choose between creating a short film in a video editing program or programming a game of their choice using pre-established programming languages. Note that the teacher gave us absolutely zero training in those languages (or in any, for the record).

With no knowledge of the area but curious to learn, my group jumped into the programming project. We ended up creating a fun tic-tac-toe game with inefficient code and some bugs in the mix.

I enjoyed doing the project, but I didn’t learn a lot because I let my very enthusiastic colleague do all the work. I was by his side whenever he programmed, but I soon learned that that was very…

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Catarina Pedreira

CyberSecurity Engineer. I also love writing, reading, and making music.