In spirit of #NationalCodingWeek I thought I’d give my two cents on programming.
So, should you learn to code?
The short answer – yes! The long answer is probably too long! In today’s Britain, there are literally hundreds of reasons to hack a crack at it.
In so many sectors, it is fast becoming the norm to have a programming language on your CV. Just looking at my friends; I can pick out a few examples. Web analysts need to interact with sites through the language of your web browsers, Javascript. The insurance industry love a spreadsheet, so learning Excel’s scripting language goes a long way. Even medicine, I’ve seen doctors making their shifts a bit easier by writing web apps with Python. I could carry on, but the bottom line is, coding is everywhere! But work life aside, coding is fun (I had to get one biased opinion in there!).
So where do you start?
If you were to Google subjects like “what programming language should I learn?” or “how do I start programming?” – you probably won’t get the best of answers. The Internet is rife with unhelpful, rude and often condescending answers on this. But there are some gems out there! Codecademy is an amazing website to learn coding, and its completely free! Maybe you’re only interested in making websites, in that case I would also check out w3schools.
Lastly, you may not think it, but your local library is often a great source of computing knowledge. We may spend most of our days writing illegible text on a dark screen, but there are some of us that are also amazing writers, and have produced some great books for newbies. That’s how I started. My suggestion would be pick something widespread and easy to read. Python is a great example, and it was where I began. Or you could try Javascript. The language of websites, its that widespread you probably don’t need to install anything on your computer, just start experimenting with the Developer Tools in Firefox or Google Chrome. But don’t worry too much over the ‘what’, ‘where’ or ‘why’ – just start coding!