Humans of SPF is a feature that allows the students and faculty of the Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School to share their unique stories. Sophomore Matt London is an avid computer programmer looking to pursue a career in cybersecurity.
 
How did you get into programming?
 
A while back, when I was in fourth grade, I got really interested in computers. My sister’s friend came over who was into programming, and after he left I was like, “I’m going to get into this!” So I googled a video of how to program, not realizing there were so many languages, and I learned some basic HTML. Then I moved on to batch programming, then Bash, then Python, and in the end a bunch of other languages.
 
What have you been able to do with programming?
 
It would be hard to explain something like that, but I wrote this program where you would pass in a bunch of different words. So for example, say you wanted to see who uses more unique words, Confucius, or Donald Trump. You would pass in a bunch of Confucius’ words and Donald Trump’s words, and it would then count how many words appear not counting the same word multiple times.
 
Do you see yourself going into a career with programming?
 
In a way yes, because I want to pursue a career in cybersecurity which is heavily oriented around computer programming. I think that the experience that I have gained from the past few years practicing is going to be really useful in the future.
 
What is cybersecurity?
 
Cybersecurity is how to protect systems that are on the internet or on a network of any kind from attackers, hackers, or anybody who wants to do harm.
 
Do you have any tips for people who want to get into programming?
 
Yea, I would say if you want to learn a programming language what you should do is learn the very basics. Then after that think of a project that you can do with that language. As you are working through the project if you don’t know something just look it up, and then you learn.
 
Is it hard to get into programming?
 
Not really. You can start with an easy language like Python. Python is very easy but very useful.