09-03-2026: To code or not code

When it neared my time to write my bachelor thesis, I honestly had zero ideas for what to write. I have been studying this for over 2 years at this point, and still felt like an imposter. I did okay in my classes, understood things when I really sat down to do so and could read code better than I could write it. I hadn't found a niche in the field that I was particularly drawn to compared to others. But I knew I didn't want to do something too out of my scope and something that required tons of interviews with people as I knew I wouldn't have the capacity for either. In other words, I dreaded this.

Throughout my bachelor I found that I quite liked understanding the 'hows' and 'whys' of computers more than sitting down and figuring out the 'what' (though they are all related of course). This meant, despite my mediocre grades, I enjoyed courses that focused on low-level stuff and the back-end and the theory behind.

I find programming much more tangble when I know exactly what is going on behind the scenes.

So as I was going for a job interview for being TA for a compiler course I took, I figured I would also ask my professor to supervise a project involving the compiler. He threw tons of ideas in my face about what to do to extend the compiler and eventually we ended up with concurrency.