Sat 23 Jun 2018

The First Line of Code

“The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

-Douglas Adams

I always had a desire to look under the hood of the video games and software I spent so much time on growing up but I was greeted with a rainbow of semi-colons and syntax before immediately closing the lid of my laptop and retiring back to being merely an end-user.

It took until a computer science course at age 14 in my school before I was finally able to understand just the basics of what I could do with a keyboard. The language was python and the atmosphere wasn’t me alone in a bedroom at a monitor scratching my head in fury, it was a class effort. None of us understood what was going on and it made it all the more accessible.

In my current exploration of programming languages I see far too many people telling those learning to code of how you ‘must’ do this and I watch videos of monotonous commentators who half explain some concepts that fly over newcomers heads. I feel the steep learning curve that programming has is a mighty feat without an actual teacher or a series of quality YouTube videos that only come around once in a blue moon.

This blog will be a documentation of my journey from having basic grasps of a few programming languages through a higher education computer science course and my video-game creating antics on the side. It will detail my learning experiences and may help anyone else wanting to learn what the pathway is like.