My First Computer Science “Project”

I can’t believe it — It’s been nearly ten years since I wrote my first computer program. Sometime in the year 2006. It was a Turbo C++ program. In the computer science lab at school. I don’t remember what it did. But I do remember the excitement I felt when I compiled and ran the code. I was so ecstatic to see the output displayed on my screen!

I recently found the code and screenshots of the first computer science project I worked on at school, probably little over a year later, in 2007. I worked on this with a friend and classmate, Ramaa. The project was a Ray Optics Tutorial that graphically displayed how to construct ray diagrams for converging and diverging mirrors and lenses. We were learning about Ray Optics in our Physics class back then. Here are some of the screenshots from the tutorial we created:

We had so much fun working on the project — endless sessions of writing functions for each case (lens or mirror, converging and diverging)! Looking at the code now, I can definitely say it’s not modular at all, and we didn’t use the best coding practices for variable names or comments (heck, we didn’t even write any comments!) but the code seems well indented. None the less, we all have to start somewhere, and that was definitely a fun and memorable start. Not to mention, Ramaa and I continue to be great friends.