The Art Of Code
Coding can enable you to change the world, one application at a time.
I suck at Maths.
I know a lot of people say that, but in my case, it’s really true.
I struggled for years at school, simply not getting it. It was like a puzzle that everyone could crack except for me. Later in life, I was diagnosed by a friend as having a learning disability.
But I was smart in other areas and so I focused on building those skills: writing, communicating, learning languages, paying attention, listening and sharing. Thanks to a very unique internship at the DuPont Spruance Plant my junior year and a fantastic Bachelor of Arts education at Longwood University, I focused my job search in the Technology sector after graduation. I was employed as a Technical Writer, which relies specifically on those skills I had honed.
It also brought out what I like to call my ‘Closet Geek.’ Introduced to new software systems, she burst out of the cupboards and I’ve never been able to squish her back inside. For me, technology (including software and hardware) should fundamentally change people’s lives for the better. I’ve seen it happen (and have seen some terrible cases where it made them much worse) and there’s nothing more exciting. But the User Interface that is shown is just a render of some clever developer’s code. How did she do that? Where did this bit come from? Where did hhe pull this piece of external data? How does it all marry together into one seamless, usable and life-changing system? The more software I saw, the more questions I seemed to have.
I used to sit with my developer friends Alex and Becki for hours, watching their fingers work magic on the keyboard across any number of programming languages. They taught me how to read code, and how to recognize the good from the bad. “Why write a line of code in 20 strokes when you can do it in 10?,” was their mantra. They used to tease each other to see who could write the most elegant code. Our colleague and friend Tracey was our Quality Assurance expert. Watching this intelligent threesome work out a problem in the code was an inspiration to me. Teamwork, knowledge, passion – this is what the IT industry means to me.
I’m neither scientist nor mathematician, but I can read and write code, and it’s helped me in numerous ways. I understand user interfaces better when I know how the code works. I can explain the fundamentals of the system easier if I know how the code has been built, ensuring the UI works the best it can for the user. As a user, I never get stumped when the UI on a system lets me down – I know how to keep working until I can wrestle it into submission or circumnavigate the problem altogether.
Learning the Art of Code has taught me how to troubleshoot, how to communicate, and impressed upon me the inherent beauty of workflow, process and logic. It’s a subject I recommend to everyone, including my own digital native 9-year-old daughter.
Coding can enable you to change the world, one application at a time.
Not good at Maths? Well, neither am I, but I’ve been in the IT industry for 25 years. What are you waiting for?
Original Post
About Author:
Christie Fidura is a Senior Consultant at The Perfect Circle, helping brands devise a strategy to build community to obtain maximum market impact.www.weareperfectcircle.co.uk/
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