How to learn coding?
A monologue I was having when someone asked, "how do I learn coding?”
I don't think coding can be learnt. It is about having a problem to solve and then solving it using a mix of tools. If we are able to solve it using any tool whatsoever, then it is coding.
There are over 100,000 (actually 800k+) computer engineers trained every year in India. Yet, the creators are handful. Most of these creators don't have a background in coding.
Learning coding
- see all images on the page
- see all links on a page
- get that table from PDF to excel
- get the mean of few numbers
- get the last trade price of any stock symbol
- get the text for any audio
- get the audio of any text
- get a picture for any word
Learning the language
- Want to Tweet anything I post on Instagram: Setting up IFTTT hooks
- Want to apply 5 Photoshop filter each time: Writing Photoshop actions
- Avoiding writing same emails each time: Writing canned responses in Gmail
- Removing tons of emails from banks: Writing search filters in Gmail
- Avoiding writing same thing (url, command, text input) each time: Alfred scripts, AutoHotKey
- Fetching data of stocks: Google Sheet formula eg
=Googlefinance
- Formatting Excel data each time: recording macros in VBA
- Doing some stuff in Excel each time: writing macros in VBA
- Getting stuff from a web-page: writing Javascript bookmarklets
- Generating powerful graphs: importing CSVs in Tablue
- Creating custom dashboards: writing SQL in Metabase
- Creating databases (complex Excel sheets): creating tables in Airflow
- Sending emails and notifications: setting up hooks in Zappier
Extensive coding is only required when we want to distribute our creation with others. This stuff is hard.
We need to have an installer (app, website, exe). And we need to have a UI that is easy to use. These things often require more code than the code for problem itself.
But the good thing is that you will automatically start figuring these things out. How? Because now you know the art of solving the problems - the coding!
Thanks to Aniruddha for listening to this monologue.