(re)Learning to code – and why you shouldn’t waste a great skill

It’s funny, I spent 9 years of my pre-working life learning to code in Visual Basic, first in Computer Science in high school, then whilst studying Information Systems at university. Almost immediately after leaving the academic environment I stopped coding outside of the odd script. Frankly, I used my SQL skills significantly more often over the course of the next 13 years as I moved directly into an analytical space where building something meant building something in Excel, or in Access.

In hindsight, stopping coding is one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life. Code, and development skills, are so central to the professional space I’m in (and honestly, life in general these days) and the space I want to be in that I’m now at a real disadvantage when I have something I’ve not had since university – free time. Obviously I can work hard now to relearn the skill, but I’d not need to if I’d put even a small amount of effort at maintaining and improving the skill over time.

There’s a general life lesson in this: if you spend any length of time learning a valuable skill, even if you’re not in the mindset to love it and be great at it once the immediate learning has ended, don’t let the skill atrophy. Practice it a little, keep in touch with it, and you might find your mindset about it changing. It’s a bit like trying foods you never liked as a child – your tastes may change over time.

In my case, I was never in love with coding. My mindset about it in whilst at school and university was mainly “this is a requirement to do well in the class/course, I need to be good enough at it.” This mindset made it easy to stop coding – after all, I was just doing it ‘because’, with no clear goal or objective in mind other than succeeding at the class. And when that ended, so did the desire to code.

One advantage I’ve had in my life is that I’m capable of changing my perspective on something. As I grow older, I realise that’s a surprisingly uncommon thing. I change my perspective for two reasons: either because I’ve gained more knowledge, or because someone passionate about a domain or idea has said something that resonated with me. In the case of code, I read a sample of RB Whitaker’s book on C# code. In the introduction, he talks about the similarities between playing computer games, and coding. The creativity, the challenge, the problem solving, the translation of thoughts in your mind to something tangible in the real world. That’s exciting to me. It resonates in a similar way to the a conversation I had with a friend around golf, which entirely changed my perspective on the game and encouraged me to try it again. Much to the detriment of my bank balance and free time.

So now I’m going to approach coding from a slightly different mental perspective. Code – much as writing – allows me to turn the thoughts and designs into my head into a reality that you can interact with. That’s damn cool. That’s fun. That’s challenging. That’s also a bit scary because what if the thoughts in my head, when translated into something tangible, are rubbish? Well that’s part of the process at getting better. And since my goal is to get better, I’ll just have to be comfortable with occasionally (often) producing rubbish.

I’ve bought RB Whitaker’s book (books are still a wonderful way of learning, as nice as YouTube and online video courses may be). Visual Studio is reinstalled. The first blank console project is created. Let’s C where this goes.

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