Hello World

#include <stdio.h>
void main(){
    printf("Hello World");
    return 0;
}

I started programming in C the way most undergraduates start programming in C. That is, by copying down whatever "stdio.h" was and surrounding "Hello World" with seemingly random braces and parentheses and other cryptic things. I could guess that "printf" probably printed something (to an actual physical printer? Yes? No? I thought we were doing the whole paperless thing?) but I didn't know what "void" I was stepping into. And I certainly didn't know why I wasn't returning anything. But lo, I compiled, ran and the only thing that was printed to my terminal was the plain old text inside my double quotes.

There was something mystical about the braces and the strange words. There must be something worth including in stdio.h to make this trickery happen. It seems I shared the fascination of Lord Gaben:



And so began my fascination with how those 5 lines of code worked. It turns out there's quite a lot of theory you can learn about computing from just that little snippet. It's a horribly boring program, as most introductory ones are, but as my housemate once told me "only boring people get bored".

This blog is my first foray into the world of internet writing; I've started it to practise writing as much as I can. Back in my school/university days I was writing all sorts of essays and dissertations on a silly amount of topics pretty much daily. Since leaving the world of academia last year, however, I've realised that my skills have faded somewhat. It's time to get them back up to scratch and then build on them. It's a somewhat selfish goal. Shouldn't a blog be about things that interest other people? Trips around the world involving shark caging and community work in Ethopia? Building a school for endangered snow leopards? Well, I'll try to write about some things that might interest a few people. The plan is to break posts up into three main categories:

• Confessions of an Ex-Psychonaut
• The Journey to Forge 1st Viscount Systems
• Generalised Interest

Maybe there will be more categories in the future. I hope so. For now, all you need to know, distant reader, is that I'm a twenty something wannabe hacker with a 2:1 in Electronic Engineering a past that doesn't quite fit where I am in life at the moment. Where am I? Living at my Mum's house whilst working as a landscape gardener. 

We'll explore how that all came to pass later on.

Much love x