You know what? Having things to live for in life is important. Without those, life has no meaning. So it is very important to have things to always be working for. This is a reflection on my own personal goals, written with my opinion of the meaning of life in mind.
Download As A Word DocumentI believe in living by a few key values, and I try my best to base my life around them. Things like unreasonable confidence, a unique personality, the power of motivation, and my interest in improving other people's lives dictate the way I interact and handle many situations. One very important value, however, that stands out to me more than any other is hard work. The value of hard work, in my opinion, really can't be overstated. It is my belief that the things you have are only worth having if you worked at or for them. From the smallest achievements to the largest goals you meet, from getting a job to having a career, everything of value in life is earned. None of it is given to you. The better you are at working to achieve something, the more it will mean to you.
This is an ideal that has served me well in my eighteen years of being alive, and I wouldn't have even half of the things I do without it. The skills, talents, and basically the person I am today I have achieved through work, and that is something I plan on continuing in my future, shortterm and longterm.
My interests, also, are based on hard work. My primary area of interest is technology, or, more specifically, working with it. I enjoy setting up and configuring computers and servers for various tasks, as well as developing programs and applications that help automate and drive my daily workflow. The knowledge I have acquired was not easy to come by--writing code certainly isn't an easy skill to pick up--but because I was so interested in being able to do all these things, I put in a lot of effort to learn how.
My interest in computers has only grown recently, and thus, I decided to research that field and see how I could better become engaged with it. It would seem, from the various articles, forums, and individuals I have consulted, that the primary way to become more involved with technology is to practice it. If I want to get better at development, a good way to do that is to develop programs and undertake projects that are useful in some way, be it in my daily life or for the benefit of others. If I want to get more into cloud computing and automation, a great way to do that is to find a reason to use a virtual server and begin learning how to interact with and configure it to suit my needs. The best way to do anything in this field is to complete projects and solve problems with computers, and that is what I will be doing.
I plan on becoming a better developer by learning key concepts in this field and proving I know them by doing projects involving my newfound knowledge.
It is my hope that by achieving these goals, I will not only enhance my own skills in this area but also be able to make a difference in the lives of others as well. If you think about a problem you encounter daily, chances are that there is a way to reduce your time spent on that problem or eliminate it entirely. From small things, like forgetting to fill out your "Healthy At NKU" survey every day, to larger things, like forgetting you're a broke college student and spending money you don't have, technology can help you out in all sorts of ways. For example, why not have a computer complete your NKU survey for you every day so you never have to remember to do it again? Or how about an app that sends you a notification every time you swipe your card to let you know how much money you have left in your bank account? I want to be able to solve problems such as these to make people's lives a little bit easier, because think about how much more time you'd have to focus on things that matter the most to you compared to the time spent dealing with a whole host of other, less significant problems.
I hope not only to be able to develop solutions to these problems, but perhaps introduce something new entirely that doesn't address an issue, but allows people to use technology in an entirely different manner. Take weather radar, for example. It's a very interesting and useful way to track storms in your area, and comes in handy when you're needing to plan for working around them in your day. It shows you where rain is, how close to you it is, how intense it is, and all kinds of other things. But it's entirely visual, and that leaves those with limited or no sight without any sort of accessible equivalent. If I could come up with a way to turn that radar into audio data, and release that framework to the general public, the way the blind acquire weather information would be completely changed forever.
It's innovative and creative things like that I want to be able to come up with and develop, and what makes me even more motivated to do such a thing is my desire to help others. It has and always will be something that I love to do in any way possible. Having the skill to improve people's lives via technology really appeals to me, because if computers are what I enjoy, and helping people is what I enjoy, why shouldn't I put those together?
But, before I can possibly accomplish something that large, I have to start a little smaller. I don't even fully understand everything I'd need to begin with such a big idea. Notice my first goal above was to better acquaint myself with development concepts that were still alien to me. So, in order to achieve that goal, I propose a project that might be a little easier to complete. This project would also aim to assist visually impaired computer users with a common problem. That problem is known as the inaccessibility of "terminal."
There are two methods of using a pc. You can use the GUI, or graphical user interface, which is composed of buttons, links, lists, shapes, icons, and other visual elements which you interact with via mouse clicks. Then there's terminal, or command prompt, where you tell your machine what to do via entering commands in text. The problem with terminal, for blind users, at least, is that it's more than a little inaccessible. Once you enter a command into command prompt, it will analyze what you've typed, act on it, then output the result of your command. For example, if you typed "ls" to list the contents of the folder you were in, you'd get each folder name and some extra info about it printed to your screen. And while this is mostly fine for the visually impaired, because output is spoken, the problem is with reviewing it once it's finished. For example, if you were listening to a list of over a hundred files being read to you, chances are you're going to miss some small detail you'll need later, and this is why reviewing output is necessary.
The way terminal is designed prevents this for those using a screenreader, however. While it is easy enough for a sighted person to read back over the output to find anything they need, navigating lengthy pages of text for the blind can be very difficult, bordering on impossible. For one to read output in a timely manner, it is faster to copy all the text from that window, open a blank text document, paste it there, and use the arrow keys to review it. However, pressing the arrow keys in terminal simply reveals a history of commands you have typed, not their output.
It is my hope that I can develop a more accessible solution. An entirely different terminal, perhaps. One that is scripted in a manner so that it is totally accessible. This would speed the workflow of terminal users everywhere because the time spent copying, pasting, and switching to entirely different applications to review command history would be eliminated.
To take on this project, however, I would need to learn much, much more about development. I would need to understand how GUI's work, so as to code one of my own. I would need to understand how computers, servers, and networks worked, so as to be able to integrate common protocols such as SSH (Secure Shell Host, a secure and encrypted way of connecting to another computer via terminal so as to control it remotely with commands) into my own application. I would need to learn a lot more about a lot of concepts I don't have any knowledge on now, so that I could carry out this idea.
By doing this, I would accomplish my goal of becoming more acquainted with technologies I previously had only a vague understanding of. As this program would involve implementation of everything I want to learn more about as well as many things I hadn't ever considered, I would be able to fulfill that quite easily. I'd also be able to complete my second goal of using these skills to develop something that addresses a common problem people face, as my more accessible implementation of a terminal would help many visually impaired folks out.
I doubt I'd be able to complete this on my own, however. I would most likely need the help of other blind developers who have much more experience than I do with programming. Although it certainly is possible to learn everything by myself and apply it to my project, those who have spent more time coding than I have may know of better ways of implementing certain processes and features so that the end application runs much more smoothly and quickly.
This is one very longterm project, but it would be worth it if I carried it out, and I believe, within five years, that I very well could.