Day 134 of writing every day.
Spending hours every day at home learning coding languages, I’m slowly gaining a new perspective of how things work behind the screens so many people spend hours looking at every day. So much of what we use is connected to the internet, but the internet is not a single entity but rather the network joining devices together across the world. When you connect to the internet, it’s your device contacting a server and programming that makes it possible for data to get sent back and forth.
Part of the text I read as homework assigned before the first lesson with the online school included inspiring quotes about coding. If I remember correctly it was all content taken from a short video made over a decade ago that compiled statements made by famous individuals about the importance of learning to code.
A quote from then-president Barack Obama asked kids to learn to code—telling them instead of being consumers, to be producers of games for example. I think that’s something one learns first when they take a plunge into the world of coding.
Whenever we surf the web or use an app, everything is usually a finished product—not perfect, but finished. You expect things to just work like magic and curse the incompetent developers when some problem occurs. Well, when you start coding, you learn that there’s so much work involved to make even something simple run that you might start to appreciate the beauty of some finished but flawed products and services.
For me, this has also meant starting to look at the things I use or come across, not as a user, but as someone who might be inspired to create something similar. That means looking at things and breaking down their components and what kinds of functions are being used to create the user interface or experience for example.
Actual engineers might have more to say but I’ve written enough for today.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 