Getting started with C++
My journey started with wanting to be an audio developer, that guy who writes software for musicians. At that time I was working as composer and sound designer in the video game industry so I already had some useful experience to transition into the software development world. I wasn't completely sure about making this decision to be honest but my guts told me that I could learn to code anyway since as a kid I always had a great fascination for knowing how everything works.
Audio developers usually start learning to code with an audio development framework called JUICE. However, I chose a different approach that could give me solid fundations in programming instead. That's why I started to read again a book I found before to teach myself how to code in C# and solve its exercises in C++. For months and step by step I went through most of its chapters in my spare time while spending my last days in the video game industry.
While I was already familiar with loops, variables and conditionals from implementing audio at work, the process became challenging when I learned data structures, trees specially. I remember now that moving the position of a node in a linked list without creating an auxilary list gave a huge head ache which -effect thankfully pushed me to understand pointers. Overcoming that roadblock unlocked harder exercises later that made me explore concepts such as functors and lambda expressions. They appeared to be impossible to grasp but at the end I managed to rely on them to have fun with trees, hash tables and so on.
I thought that developing audio software with C++ was a promising career path for me. However, my interactions with members of the audio development community made me realized that working towards becoming an audio programmer would take me much more than I expected in terms of time and effort. The main reason behind it was that to be able to look for a job in a niche industry with not so many jobs available even for skilled professionals I had to have a deep understanding of maths plus a great deal of experience in programming with C++ . My hopes were not high anymore but I kept C++ as a late night hobby.