hdu 过山车

There aren't many people out there who grew up dreaming of writing code. I definitely didn't. I wanted to design cars. But somehow I ended up building software.

很少有人梦见编写代码。 我绝对没有。 我想设计汽车。 但是我最终以某种方式开发了软件。

I used to help my grandpa work on cars in the summer when I was growing up. And I thought one day I'd grow up to be a mechanic like him. But my mom and grandma had different plans.

在我长大的夏天，我曾经帮助爷爷在汽车上工作。 我以为有一天我会长大成为像他这样的机械师。 但是我妈妈和奶奶有不同的计划。

We didn't have money, so they always kept me busy with something. Whether it was volunteering in the community, reading books from the library, or doing homework for "fun", they always had me focused on learning. I think it was mainly to keep me distracted from a lot of the chaos around me.

我们没有钱，所以他们总是让我忙于一些事情。 无论是在社区中担任志愿人员，在图书馆读书还是为“乐趣”做功课，他们总是让我专注于学习。 我认为主要是要让我从周围的混乱中分散注意力。

I grew up with my great-grandma, who is the mom I refer to throughout this. My family was all over the place and it wasn't the most stable environment. But with my mom and grandma shielding me from a large amount of that craziness, I was able to pretend to escape into my love for math and experiments.

我与我的曾祖母一起长大，在整个过程中，我都是她的母亲。 我的家人到处都是，那不是最稳定的环境。 但是，由于我的妈妈和奶奶使我免受了如此疯狂的困扰，我得以假装逃脱了对数学和实验的热爱。

There was one birthday present I remember as my first exposure to anything tech-related. It was a little VTech laptop and I loved that thing. I took it everywhere, playing whatever games were on it.

我记得有一个生日礼物，这是我第一次接触任何与技术相关的东西。 那是一台小的伟易达笔记本电脑，我很喜欢那个东西。 我随处玩，玩任何游戏。

It stopped working eventually and I tried to go back out and help my grandpa with cars. But my mom didn't want me to because I was a girl. That kind of crushed my little hopes and dreams of becoming a mechanic.

最终它停止了工作，我试图退出并帮助爷爷开车。 但是我妈妈不想要我，因为我是一个女孩。 这种压倒了我成为机械师的小希望和梦想。

There were times I would try to sneak out and work with him, but he knew it would only make my mom mad, so he'd send me back inside.

有时候我会尝试偷偷溜出去和他一起工作，但是他知道那只会让我妈妈生气，所以他会把我送回屋里。

I'd go back in and start thinking of other stuff I could work on inside of the house. Eventually I got good enough to do minor plumbing and electrical work with a lot of tinkering and a lot of luck.

我回去，开始考虑我可以在屋子里做的其他事情。 最终，我有足够的能力去做一些小的水暖工程和电气工作，但又需要很多修补和运气。

To this day I still don't understand why mom thought working with electricity was better than working on cars, but she never yielded on that issue.

直到今天，我仍然不明白为什么妈妈认为用电比在汽车上工作要好，但是她从不屈服于这个问题。

从机械师到工程师 (From Mechanic to Engineer)

I still wanted to do something with cars because of how much I enjoyed working on them so I picked the next best thing: designing the cars that mechanics get to work on!

我仍然想对汽车做些事情，因为我喜欢在汽车上做很多事情，所以我选择了下一个最好的方法：设计可以让汽车上班的汽车！

That didn't seem like a real job at the time, so I satiated that desire by drawing pictures of concepts I thought were cool. Then I'd try to do some math behind them to see if I could build a prototype out of the junk we had around.

当时那似乎还不是一项真正的工作，所以我通过画出我认为很酷的概念来满足了这一愿望。 然后，我尝试在它们后面做一些数学运算，看看是否可以从周围的垃圾中制造出原型。

Luckily someone saw me doing that and they starting talking about engineering and that they get to design stuff like that. That's when I made up my mind to become a mechanical engineer. I was probably about 13 at the time and things at home were becoming more hectic.

幸运的是，有人看到我这样做了，他们开始谈论工程，然后开始设计类似的东西。 那是我下定决心要成为机械工程师的时候。 那时我大概13岁，家里的事情变得越来越忙。

机械工程学的动机 (Motivation for Mechanical Engineering)

The immediate family I grew up around was largely elderly people. They had started dying. And that was a lot to handle.

我在附近长大的直系亲属主要是老年人。 他们已经快死了。 这需要处理很多。

Keep in mind that, by now, my mom was about 87 years old. At the time I kind of thought it was because we didn't have enough money. I learned that engineers make a lot of money, so I doubled down on my decision.

请记住，到目前为止，我妈妈已经约87岁。 当时我有点以为是因为我们没有足够的钱。 我了解到工程师赚了很多钱，所以我加倍做出决定。

At that point, no one in my family had been to college and nobody knew what an engineer actually did. I think my mom thought I was going to drive trains for a while.

那时，我家中没有人上过大学，没人知道工程师实际上做了什么。 我想我妈妈以为我要开车一段时间。

To be honest, I didn't fully understand what an engineer did until I was almost done with college.

老实说，直到我几乎完成大学工作，我才完全了解工程师的工作。

From the reading I had done, I just saw you needed to be good at math and science and I loved those things already so it made sense for me to keep going. Then I joined a robotics club in high school and that's where I got my first whiff of code.

从我所做的阅读中，我刚刚看到您需要精通数学和科学，并且我已经喜欢那些东西，因此继续前进对我来说很有意义。 然后我在高中时加入了一个机器人俱乐部，那是我第一次接触代码的地方。

It was amazing getting hardware to respond to my commands from a computer. While it was fun, I still went off to college determined to be the best mechanical engineer, and to go design awesome cars because cars were one of the best parts of my childhood.

使硬件能够从计算机响应我的命令真是太了不起了。 虽然很有趣，但我还是去了决心要成为最好的机械工程师的大学，并去设计了不起的汽车，因为汽车是我童年时期最好的部分之一。

大学时间 (College Time)

There was so much I didn't know about college. I didn't start talking to anyone at school about college until maybe the beginning of senior year of high school.

有这么多，我不知道大学。 直到高中高年级开始，我才开始与任何人谈论大学。

I knew you had to apply, but I didn't know you had to pay. Until I talked to a guidance counselor, I thought college was just what happened after high school if you wanted to stay in school longer. You just put in your application, get accepted, and go.

我知道您必须申请，但我不知道您必须付款。 在我与指导顾问交谈之前，我认为大学就是高中毕业后发生的事情，如果您想在学校呆更长的时间。 您只需放入您的应用程序，被接受，然后继续。

The level of absolute emptiness I felt when I first saw how much college cost almost made me give up immediately. We couldn't afford to keep people alive, so where would we get the money for college?

当我第一次看到大学的费用几乎让我立即放弃时，我感到绝对的空虚。 我们无力维持人们的生命，那么我们从哪里获得大学的钱呢？

My dad is an army veteran, so he was able to help me use some of his disability benefits and that helped take a bit of the stress off. Thankfully, my counselor taught me about scholarships and a bit about financial aid. By now it was the spring and scholarship deadlines were around the corner.

我父亲是一名退伍军人，因此他能够帮助我使用一些残障福利，从而减轻了一些压力。 值得庆幸的是，我的辅导员教给我有关奖学金的知识以及有关经济援助的知识。 现在是春天，奖学金的截止日期迫在眉睫。

After that I spent almost all of my free time search for and applying for any and every scholarship I remotely qualified for. I probably applied for hundreds of scholarships and I was actually able to piece together enough of them to get my first year completely paid for.

在那之后，我几乎将所有的业余时间都花在寻找和申请我遥不可及的任何奖学金上。 我可能申请了数百项奖学金，实际上我能够将其中的全部拼凑在一起，以使第一年的学费全额支付。

大学时代 (College days)

I went into my freshman year on a mission because I didn't understand anything. I thought that if you took out loans you basically die so I was terrified of them. I didn't even go to the financial aid office my first semester because I was scared of that place.

大一的时候我去执行任务，因为我什么都不懂。 我以为，如果您借出贷款，您基本上会死，所以我对他们感到恐惧。 我上学期甚至没有去财政援助办公室，因为我怕那个地方。

It definitely worked out for the best, because every semester I would spend hours searching for and applying for scholarships. I was able to get through college debt-free doing this. It took a lot of work, but it was some of the best work I had experienced up to that point.

它肯定是最好的，因为每个学期我都会花数小时来寻找和申请奖学金。 这样我就可以免除大学债务。 花费了很多工作，但这是我到目前为止所经历的一些最好的工作。

I joined everything that would let me work with cars – from welding frame joints on the SAE team to designing body panels in SolidWorks. I did undergrad research in aerospace just so I could learn more about aerodynamics and materials to make better cars.

从SAE团队的车架接头焊接到SolidWorks中的车身面板设计，我参与了所有使我可以与汽车一起使用的工作。 我只是在航空航天领域进行了本科研究，所以我可以学习更多有关空气动力学和材料的知识，以制造出更好的汽车。

My journey into engineering research started out of both passion and necessity and it was an incredible time. I became a lab rat for years and most of it was hands-on work. We used power tools, created out own bills of materials, and built the things we designed on paper or in SolidWorks.

我从事工程研究的旅程是从热情和必要性开始的，那是一段令人难以置信的时光。 我已经成为实验老鼠多年了，其中大部分是动手工作。 我们使用了电动工具，创建了自己的物料清单，并在纸上或在SolidWorks中构建了我们设计的东西。

大学“分心” (College "Distractions")

By this point I was half-way through sophomore year when I got hit with the first blow. One of my best friends died in a car accident. It hurt, but I was able to kind of "power through" and stay focused. Then the worst, most random news came.

至此，我已经大二了一半，当时我受到了第一击。 我最好的朋友之一死于车祸。 这很痛苦，但是我能够“通过”并保持专注。 然后，最糟糕，最随机的消息传来了。

My grandpa got diagnosed with cancer, and he was gone in less than 4 months. That shook me to my core.

我的祖父被诊断出患有癌症，而他在不到四个月的时间内就离开了人世。 那使我震惊了。

I considered dropping out several times during this period, but my mom and grandma keep me encouraged. They pushed me when I didn't want to budge.

我曾考虑过在这段时间退学几次，但我的妈妈和奶奶让我感到鼓舞。 当我不想让步时，他们推了我。

I was coming home every weekend at this point, so I basically went class, lived in the lab, and took my homework home every weekend. I wanted to help my grandma take care of mom because she was getting older and she couldn't drive anymore. So we teamed up and took care of her.

此时，我每个周末都要回家，所以基本上我上课，住在实验室里，每个周末都把作业带回家。 我想帮我奶奶照顾妈妈，因为她年纪大了，不能开车了。 因此，我们联手照顾了她。

Throughout all of my home concerns, I still tried to escape into my coursework. Then code started popping up more and more in my assignments. And I took the one class that really shook my confidence in my path that had been so dedicated to cars.

在我所有的家庭问题中，我仍然试图逃脱自己的课程。 然后代码开始在我的作业中越来越多地弹出。 我参加的那一堂课真的让我对一直专注于汽车的道路充满信心。

“真实”编码 ("Real" Coding)

We worked with PIC micro-controllers using C and I was hooked. I loved everything about getting those sensors to work together, and how you could use the data to make real world things happen. That blew my mind, and I started wandering down that path.

我们与使用C的PIC单片机一起工作，我被迷住了。 我喜欢使这些传感器协同工作的一切，以及如何使用数据使现实世界中的事情变为现实。 那使我大吃一惊，然后我开始沿着那条路徘徊。

But cars were still in the back of my mind. Cars had always been in my life and they got me through a lot of hard times. So I wasn't ready to imagine doing anything else.

但是汽车仍然在我的脑海中。 汽车一直以来都是我的生活，它们使我度过了很多艰难的时期。 所以我还没准备好想做其他的事情。

Ignoring my conflicting feelings, I jumped into a different research project where I could work with micro-controllers. That was my first real departure from the mechanical path. Then I hit a major crossroads when it was time to graduate.

无视我的矛盾情绪，我跳入了一个可以与微控制器一起工作的研究项目。 那是我第一次真正脱离机械路线。 然后，当我要毕业时，我遇到了一个重要的十字路口。

研究生院 (Grad School)

My mom's health was on a noticeable decline and I wanted to stay close by. So I decided to go to graduate school for mechanical and aerospace engineering. That's when the big switch came.

我妈妈的健康状况明显下降，我想待在附近。 所以我决定去机械与航空工程研究生院。 那是大开关来的时候。

My research ended up focusing on machine learning algorithms on-board an autonomous golf cart. I wrote more code than I ever imagined I would in my life. And I'm not sure if I'll ever write code that complex again.

我的研究最终专注于自主高尔夫球车上的机器学习算法。 我编写的代码超出了我一生中的想象。 而且我不确定是否会再写那么复杂的代码。

While I was still working with hardware, my focus shifted to processing all the raw data and writing code that could handle that much information so fast. After spending 16+ hour days coding and still not completely hating it, I knew it was hopeless.

当我仍在使用硬件时，我的工作重点转移到处理所有原始数据和编写可以如此快地处理大量信息的代码。 在花了16个小时以上的时间编码之后，仍然没有完全讨厌它，我知道这是没有希望的。

It got to the point that the car part of the research didn't matter nearly as much as the beauty of my code. That's where the final difficult decision came.

直截了当地指出，研究的汽车部分并没有像我的代码之美那么重要。 那就是最终困难的决定来的地方。

I had to decide whether to move – so I could keep working on cool robotics projects – or stay with family and try working as an engineer.

我必须决定是否搬家-这样我才能继续从事出色的机器人项目–还是与家人在一起并尝试以工程师的身份工作。

I made a decision I've never regretted and I stayed with my family. My mom didn't live long enough to see me become a "master" engineer. But I'm glad I was there to share the time with her I had.

我做出了一个我从不后悔的决定，并且和家人在一起。 我妈妈活的时间不够长，看不到我成为一名“总”工程师。 但我很高兴能在那里与我分享她的时光。

She died a few months before I graduated. And the rest of that semester is still a blur.

我毕业前几个月她去世了。 那学期的其余时间仍然很模糊。

Thankfully throughout all of this I had a very sweet boyfriend, who is now my husband, to attempt to keep me sane.

幸运的是，我有一个非常可爱的男朋友，现在是我的丈夫，试图让我保持理智。

从研究生院到工程学 (From Grad School to The Engineering)

So I tried working as a mechanical engineer in oil and gas for a while. My first day, my boss came to show me what I would be doing. He plopped down this grotesquely large stack of oddly sized paper with these technical diagrams on it called P&IDs.

因此，我尝试了一段时间的石油和天然气机械工程师工作。 我的第一天，老板来告诉我我会做什么。 他放下这张奇怪的大纸叠，上面放着这些称为P＆ID的技术图表。

Then he sat next to me with a highlighter and showed me how to go through all of the P&IDs and find specific sensors. He gave me a smile and a pat on the back and said, "I've been doing this for 37 years and we haven't changed much yet! You'll get the hang of it."

然后他用荧光笔坐在我旁边，向我展示了如何浏览所有 P＆ID和查找特定传感器。 他笑了笑，拍了拍我的背，说道：“我已经做了37年了，我们还没有做太多改变！您一定会掌握的。”

I knew that wasn't going to work. I at least wanted to look at a computer pretending to do work. That's when figured I'd try aerospace engineering. I just knew that there would be plenty of opportunities to design things in aerospace.

我知道那是行不通的。 我至少想看一台假装工作的计算机。 那时我就​​想尝试航空航天工程。 我只是知道，在航空航天领域会有很多设计机会。

After I got an aerospace job, I was introduced to CATIA V5 – which is considerably less friendly than SolidWorks – but it's an aerospace thing. That's when I found out there still wasn't any design involved!

在获得航空航天工作之后，我被介绍给CATIA V5(它比SolidWorks友好得多)，但这是航空航天的事情。 那时我发现仍然没有任何设计！

Doing standards and tolerance analyses for FAA compliance was cool for a few months. Sure, getting 800 signatures on an eighth of an inch change on a 2 inch shim was exciting. But it still wasn't what I'd hoped for.

对FAA合规性进行标准和公差分析很酷，几个月了。 当然，在2英寸垫片上八分之一英寸获得800个签名非常令人兴奋。 但这仍然不是我所希望的。

At one point I was working on nacelle analysis in FORTRAN on this super old box monitor computer setup.

有一次，我正在使用这种超级老式的盒式监视器计算机设置在FORTRAN中进行机舱分析。

This is what got me back into code. FORTRAN was so difficult that I started going back to some of the languages I had used before, like C++ and Python. After making a few useful tools for work, I knew software is probably where I should look next.

这就是让我重新回到代码中的原因。 FORTRAN非常困难，以至于我开始回到以前使用过的某些语言，例如C ++和Python。 在制作了一些有用的工作工具之后，我知道软件可能是我接下来应该看的地方。

The jobs I had were so far away from cars or design in general that I knew I had to figure out how to get a job where I could write code that didn't have to involve hardware. Engineering didn't turn out to be what I expected, so I had to make that switch happen. That's when I learned about web development.

我所从事的工作与汽车或设计领域相去甚远，以至于我知道我必须弄清楚如何找到一份工作，在这里我可以编写不需要硬件的代码。 工程学并没有达到我的期望，所以我不得不做出这种改变。 那是我了解Web开发的时候。

I still didn't want to move, because the husband likes his family and my grandma was all I had left. So I started learning how to make WordPress sites and did a little freelancing to get some experience.

我仍然不想搬家，因为丈夫喜欢他的家人，而我的祖母是我所剩下的。 因此，我开始学习如何制作WordPress网站，并做了一些自由职业以获取一些经验。

Then I dived into plugin work with PHP, and that made me research more of the free online coding resources. So I started learning more about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And the rest is history.

然后，我深入研究了PHP的插件工作，这使我研究了更多的免费在线编码资源。 因此，我开始学习有关HTML，CSS和JavaScript的更多信息。 剩下的就是历史。

Once I had a few projects under my belt, I applied for a software engineering job that still needed some engineering calculations, and that's how I got my first real software job.

一旦完成了一些项目，我就申请了软件工程工作，该工作仍然需要进行一些工程计算，这就是我获得第一份真正的软件工作的方式。

在代码中成长 (Growing in Code)

After that, I just slowly started improving my skills. I got into the MVC and .NET Core worlds. That was a cool tech stack, but as I learned more about JavaScript and all that I could do with it, I decided to dive deeper into those stacks.

之后，我才慢慢开始提高自己的技能。 我进入了MVC和.NET Core世界。 那是一个很酷的技术堆栈，但是当我对JavaScript及其所能做的一切有了更多的了解时，我决定更深入地研究这些堆栈。

Then I accidentally ended up working as a consultant. But it was a great experience. I learned everything from front-end, back-end, database, DevOps, mobile, client management, and so much more.

然后我无意间结束了作为顾问的工作。 但这是一次很棒的经历。 我从前端，后端，数据库，DevOps，移动，客户端管理等中学到了很多东西。

That's where I really had to time to see everything and figure out what I really wanted to do. So I jumped into React and Node, and that's where I'm currently the happiest.

那是我真正必须时间查看所有内容并弄清楚我真正想做什么的地方。 所以我跳进了React和Node，那是我目前最幸福的地方。

代码工程 (Engineering in Code)

One thing I weirdly miss about being in one of the physical engineering worlds is the amount of structure around everything. No matter what you tried to do, there was always standard knowledge that had been established, researched, and tested.

我很想念一个物理工程界的一件事就是围绕着一切的结构量。 无论您尝试做什么，总会建立，研究和测试标准知识。

Software doesn't have any type of enforcement like mechanical engineering, because most of the stuff we make won't kill anyone if it breaks. So I started taking some of the design principles I had never gotten a chance to apply to cars, and applying them to my personal software projects.

软件没有像机械工程那样的任何类型的强制执行，因为我们制造的大多数东西都不会在破坏时杀死任何人。 因此，我开始采用一些从未有过的应用于汽车的设计原则，并将其应用于我的个人软件项目。

That's when I started finding amazing opportunities. I get to build projects that range from machine learning on the front-end to serverless apps and virtual reality games using the same methods I was taught as an engineer.

从那时起，我开始寻找惊人的机会。 我使用与工程师一样的方法来构建从前端机器学习到无服务器应用程序和虚拟现实游戏的项目。

If you could see some of the ridiculous software equations and constants I've made up over the years, it would make you chuckle.

如果您能看到我多年来编写的一些荒谬的软件方程式和常数，那会让您发笑。

顺其自然 (Going With the Flow)

I never started out on this path and didn’t expected to go this far. It kind of happened in a lot of odd ways, just like most people that end up in this field.  There are battles I fought and won throughout this journey that I’m still recovering from.

我从没有走过这条路，没想到会走得那么远。 就像大多数最终进入该领域的人一样，这发生的方式很奇怪。 在整个旅程中，我一直在奋斗并赢得胜利，但仍在恢复中。

Even though software isn't as diverse as it could be, I've never really felt like people were trying to hold me back or pigeon-hole me into a position.

即使软件没有像它可能的那样多样化，但我从来没有真正感觉到有人试图让我退缩或让我陷入困境。

This was not the case when I was in traditional engineering. It was such a toxic place for a woman of color. I had people interrogate me on how I had gotten into the facilities for the parts I was responsible for. I had people try to belittle my accomplishments. And I ran into a few people who flat out told me they didn't want someone like me around for long.

当我从事传统工程学时，情况并非如此。 对于有色人种的女人来说，这是一个如此有害的地方。 我请人来询问我如何进入负责的零件的设施。 我曾有人试图贬低我的成就。 我遇到了几个人，他们坦率地告诉我他们不想要像我这样的人很久了。

Tech has never been that intimidating for me.

科技从来没有像我这样吓人。

One thing I can say is that I've encountered so many friendly and genuinely helpful people over the years, despite the few jerks sprinkled in between them.

我可以说的一件事是，多年来，尽管遇到了一些混蛋，但我遇到了这么多友好而真正有帮助的人。

If you've ever considered switching to anything in tech from an engineering field, just know that there are a bunch of people who will help you at every step.

如果您曾经考虑过从工程领域转向技术领域的任何事情，那就知道有很多人会在每一步为您提供帮助。

翻译自: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/mechanical-engineering-to-software-developer/

hdu 过山车