Thoughtful Thursday: A place to code home

I’m finding so many amazing websites these days that I have to share yet another!

As a woman thinking about a career change, it’s hard not to think about taking a dip in the coding pool. When I say coding I mean getting into software programming, which means learning lots of different computer language like HTML, CSS, Java, Python, Ruby, and more.

I’ve always been at least slightly interested in delving into one of these languages. When I was a mere Freshman in college, when creating your own blog site was becoming all the rage I actually took the time to learn quite a bit of HTML. Somehow, I got scared of what “coding” meant. Plenty of people were doing computer science, but they were all guys and at the time it didn’t occur to me that maybe they knew something I didn’t and that was that the next big thing was actually the computer industry.

Okay, I could have flipped open any magazine that was talking about up and coming businesses, especially being brethren of the Silicon Valley, but it just didn’t occur to me what a big market it was going to be today. And so… I got an English degree.

I actually love my English degree. It’s taught me how to speak more clearly, form my thoughts into coherent sentences, spell lots of big words that I may or may not ever use, and writing is definitely the one thing I do every single day of my life.

            Well enough talking. The site that I found is Code Academy. It is a free interactive site that feels a lot like a game and gives you a lot of the basics of many coding languages. It’s so fun that it makes me want to go back for more!

            Currently I’m easing myself back into HTML because it’s been a long time. It’s really easy, but I don’t want to skip any step and find myself lost.

            Will I ever actually use any of the programming languages that I am going to try learning?

            Who knows! My hope is that I will learn something new, I’ll have more to include on my resume, and perhaps it’ll lead to some new occupation in the future. If you are anyone that has been interested in at least trying out coding, this is the site for you! It’ll give you a taste of code and you can decide from there if you want to pursue delving further into the muck!