Many people (around 10 lol) have asked me about how did I learn to code, how could I do that if it is “too hard”, how should they start to code in order to be a developer, among other similar questions.
Today I am going to answer these main 3 questions and a little bit more taking into account my short experience of 5 years coding professionally.
When I was 15 I told myself it would be great to make websites, so I started my journey making blogs with Blogger. If you know Blogger you could say that it’s not coding since it is a kind of cms and I just was managing content. That’s true but there’s a template section where you can type html, css and js freely. Although I was writing code in this languages, I actually didn’t know what css and js were I just knew html. I used to look for what I wanted for my sites in that moment, copy codes from tutorials and paste them on the editor. It is a thing that most of developers still do. I’ll going to talk more about this on the next question though.
About my beginnings programming, I also can say that I worked with something that does not exist anymore. It was FBML, the HTML by Facebook, if you had the opportunity to try it let me know on the comments please. Well, FBML was a kind of extension for Facebook which allowed people to make a small landing page into their fan page, there you could write some html code, with some extra tags provided by Facebook, and making for example a welcome page for the users that were entering to your fan page. Unluckily, and I was part of this, people who know a bit of coding used to get likes on their fan pages by gathering users on pages with misleading titles just like “Change your Facebook color”, “Get ten thousand friends in 1 minute”, among others. The trick consisted of a simple html code which had steps you had to complete in order to get what the fan page stated and one of those steps was that you had to like many Facebook pages, how? Easy, there were “like buttons” that users clicked and when you’ve already clicked the button it disappeared so that you didn’t even know which page you had liked. Maybe, this one one of the reasons for Facebook to leave supporting FBML and I will always remember I participated on that. By the way I have a fan page which got more than 10k likes when it had around 500 before using FBML and a cheating page. Check it here! I do not post anything there so don’t expect to see good memes or something funny.
After my first web programming experiences, I started to study computer systems at high school. One of the first days a professor asked us which programming languages we knew, in that moment I was thinking “what is a programming language?” while my classmates answered: “c”, “java”, php”, “javascript” a guy said “html” and I thought “html? I know that one, is it a programming language?” Now remembering it is funny since people laugh at html saying it is not a programming language. Anyways, my point is that in that moment I didn’t know I had already coded in a programming language and it is not the worst thing I had not noticed. I had a class named “PROGRAMMING methodology” translated to Spanish “Metodología de la programación” and I used to call it just “Metodología”. In this class, we learned what an algorithm is, we also drew many flowcharts and wrote pseudo codes. One day our teacher told us to turn on the computers for coding. It was not until that moment that I noticed about the rest of the class name “de la programación”. My mind blew up, I started to relate all the words: “programming”, “coding”, “pseudo code”. That day I coded my first Hello world in C and I was really in love with programming. I began to search more and more about C for coding all the programs I had drawn a flow chart.
At the beginning it was not really easy I got many errors on my programs, a missing semicolon, missing or extra brackets and parenthesis, the equal comparison operator had to be == I used to wrote =