How I ended up with my programming job

  I'm 29 years old Korean male living in Tokyo, Japan.

  I've finished my high school education in South Korea, then served military for almost 3 years. After I got out of military, I moved to the U.S., and got bachelors degree in applied math. Since I served military for almost 3 years, and spent 5 years in the university, I was already 28 when I graduated the University.  And more importantly I had no programming knowledge and experience except 1 semester of R language (R is programming language used in statistics world).

  At that time, I was getting tired of being in the U.S. and wanted to see other countries.  And working in Japan seems very attractive to me. So I applied to the company I'm working at now, and got a job.

  About my work place, Asahi Glass Co., in short, AGC, is a company making glasses as you can see from its name. It's pretty big company. It has lots of factories all around the world. And since the company is making glasses, I was expecting doing some kind of factory line management or something similar because I didn't have any practical skills other than some basic math knowledge like set theory or probability.  Really, what can you do with the pure theoretical knowledge? However, not like my expectation, the company gave me a programming job. Um, maybe it was my fault that I didn't mention I had no programming experience?

  One funny thing about getting a job in Japan as a fresh graduate is you will never know what kind of work you are going to do in the company.  At least I and other people who got hired at the same time had no clue what we were going to do in this company.  When the company finally told me that I would be a programmer developing a heat transfer simulation software using Java, I asked them back,
  "Um.. excuse me, but what's heat transfer simulation and what is Java?"

  So basically, to develop the physics simulation software, I had to know heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and Java. And as I mentioned, I'm math major without any programming knowledge.  Also, I didn't really enjoy physics, so I didn't take any physics class (They are not required for Math majors).  My school is pretty famous in Japan, so my boss had very high expectation on me.  And when he found out that I'm virtually useless, he got really really disappointed.  He wanted me to learn all the physics and programming skills in a half year.  However, since I'm not a genius, I failed.  Then he stopped talking to me anymore. So I could have plenty of time spending reading books about programming.

  I've been working in this company about one year.  Now I call myself self-taught programmer.  I read books and Goolge to get knowledge I need.  So far, I've developed one simple heat radiation simulation software using Java and JOGL(JOGL is Java version of OpenGL).  Now, my goal is studying C and CUDA so that I can do some GPGPU.  I'm not sure how far I can go by teaching myself with little help from others.  I don't even know I'm doing it right. But it is fun, so I will keep doing this till I get eventually fired from this company.

  This blog will be my personal diary of what I'm doing at my work, how I feel, and others.