How I Learned to Code and How You Can Too

There’s no way to go about it, coding is an in demand skill and is at the heart of the tech industry which  has thousands of unfilled jobs every year. Many people are afraid to learn or just don’t have the discipline. Companies like Code.org have started initiatives like Hour of Code which organize events teaching students from all walks of life how to code. Hour of Code shows every student, boy or girl, that they can learn to code too. I’m now in a 3rd year Computer Science program and love what I do. Here’s how I did it.

I started messing around with code around grade 9, the beginning of high school. I didn’t actually know what I was doing until I took a class in grade 10 on it. I got 95% and another pair of 95s when I took the grade 11 and 12 version. Before then, I thought the key was reading books. I have several 500+ paged textbooks on Java, C++, C# and many other languages. The key to learning to write code is practice. You have to apply what you’ve read or learned or you’ll forget.

On another note, I spent way too much time worrying about which language to learn. Oddly enough, know I know several programming languages. The semantics between the languages are similar… there are if/else statements, variables, loops and objects. The only thing that really changes is the syntax… the brackets, the semicolons, the parenthesis, etc.

When I taught my sister and girlfriend to code, both of them had no idea or confidence that they could do it. I assured them that they can do it. I told them to register on Codecademy.com and start doing the lessons. Choose Python as your beginning language, and read the couple sentences and do the quiz. Each lesson requires you to apply your knowledge, which is why this method works.

Once you’re done the course, move on to creating your own projects. Try to apply what you’ve learned, use the Python documentation and third party libraries to get what you want done. You may have expected a big secret, but there is none. The only thing I could possibly call a secret is the fact that you need to practice what you’ve learned so that you actually remember what you’ve learned.