Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My journey to deciding to enroll in a software engineering program began in the early 1980’s. My father was still living at home at the time and he had a strong interest in electronics. It was fashionable for hobbyists at the time to enroll in correspondence clubs where once a week or once a month they’d receive in the mail a piece to a larger project and put it together over time. This particular time, he was putting together a HeathKit computer from Zenith. I recall seeing him solder together a board of integrated circuits to a few transistors and diodes. Over time, it began to look like a computer. I began to get interested in this myself. On the day it was ready to function, my mother’s uncle who was trained in computer science while in the Marines in the 1950’s came by to help get it going. It seemed like it took longer to start the computer than it took to start an old car in the winter. But eventually, there was a green monochrome display of: