“Everybody in this country (America) should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” –Steve Jobs. To add to this, even the previous President of the USA, Barack Obama, asked people in a YouTube video to attempt to learn coding.
Computer science will help you to think and it will further humanity but the question that we are really interested in is: Will learning code help you land a job? The simple answer is YES!
Let’s see together why learning code is important and where you can start teaching yourself.
Let’s first start by explaining what code is. Well the basis of it is very simply, it is telling a computer what to do by tipping words and characters in a certain programming language. A programming language is a set of rules and words, which tell you what commands to use to let the computer do something.
If you study computer science or if you are interested in teaching yourself to program to find a work, there is a good chance that you will find a job. Looking at the job market over the next 10 years there will be a shortage of 1 million programmers. There will be an estimated 1.4 million jobs in computer sciences but only 400.000 graduates who could fill them.
You aren’t interested in being a developer? Should you still learn how to code? The simple answer is YES! We all depend on technology and programming, any and every job today involves computers and code, but only few of us understand it. Programming will not only impress your colleagues when you explain to them how a program works but it will help you lead projects for your company or manage products where surely a line of code will come along your way. It will help you think like a developer and you can better communicate. You will become more efficient and more valuable for the company.
Do you want to create your own start-up? There are chances you will need a website or something more elaborate. You don’t have the time or knowledge to code it yourself or the resources to hire developers, so you consider outsourcing the coding. You have all the advantages mentioned beforehand. You can add to those that you will have the capability to ask the right questions and communicate with them and it will be harder to cheat you.
Many people are intrigued by code, want to learn it, but are intimidated by it and actually never start. Don’t be scared by it, you don’t have to be a genius to learn it! Start with basic code, additions and subtractions and maybe a little HTML code that says: “Hello World!” and don’t expect to program the next Facebook over night.
So where should you start? First choose what you want to learn code for. Do you want to create websites, video games, apps…? A few programming languages include:
Python and Ruby are considered to be the easiest languages to learn and to read. Both also have frameworks to easily create websites. (Ruby on rails and Django)
If you don’t have the chance to study computer science or programming at university, there are plenty of opportunities to learn it for fun or to find a job. You can find paying websites which include, www.lynda.com and www.teamtreehouse.com, but if you want to get a taste of coding and don’t want to spend money look at websites like www.codecademy.com or www.codeschool.com.
To end here is a little video to inspire you even a bit more:
