Tadej Borovšak

Engineering

The sine wave of life

I did not own a computer until I was thirteen. And I did not have access to the internet until I was eighteen when I started studying medicine at the University. Because of this, I developed a rather pragmatic relationship with technology. I never used computers to play games or watch videos much. I mainly use them to try and make my and other peoples' lives easier.

I say "mainly" because something changed during my first programming task. I was extracting MESH descriptors from medical articles when it hit me: designing and coding algorithms can be fun on their own. I did not care much that I had to deal with XML. Or that I needed to use Perl. Creating something that solved a real problem was all that mattered.

The components I used at that time were simplistic out of necessity. I did not have the programming experience to use anything complex. But with my stubbornness, I managed to get things working.

So, where does the sine wave fit in this story? For me, it represents the three virtues I value the most: simplicity, resourcefulness, and perseverance.

The sine wave on its own is rudimentary. And it is hard to imagine that it could be helpful in anything serious. But if we put some effort into stacking multiple copies, we can mimic any other wave. And the more we stack them, the better result we will get.

So here I am, trying to stack sine waves at DevRev ;)