Software Development is dead they say. AI will replace developers they say. I suspect this may be true. AI will likely be one of the biggest things to shake up the working world live in within our lifetime. Already ChatGPT can provide working code in many different coding languages. This ability will grow.
You can’t tell it to build an app yet from scratch and I am told by those wiser than I that the code often needs a bit of love to get it to play well with others. But who know what the future holds.
Before Christmas I decided to learn how to code. Well, in truth I decided this 4 years ago, but I actually to action on it before it Christmas in a serious way. Why am I doing this? Software development has interested me for many years. The wizardry inside many of the apps I love is astonishing. But none of the apps are quite ‘there’. So partly my aim was to learn how to build apps. But also, as I have looked at it, I have come to the realisation that software development and engineering combines creativity, focus, knowledge, intuition, attention to detail and problem solving in just the right mix that it seems like the perfect match for my character and personality.
Also, I am currently unemployed and have realised that whilst I have a broad amount of experience in many different areas and a lot of skills, gifts and abilities, the one thing I lack is any kind of formal qualification. Coding skill is the one thing that you can build up yourself and demonstrate with a portfolio of work behind that will land you a job even without a formal qualification.
Lastly, I want to work for Doist. The company behind ToDoist. Seriously, their ethos as a company is amazing – check out their company website.
I am currently using www.freecodecamp.org. This is exactly what it says it is. Firstly it’s totally free and they boast over 9,000 tutorials, teaching you to code in many different languages. Currently I am doing their recommended start point which ‘Responsive Web Design Certification’. This is going through the basics of HTML and CSS. You can find it here – https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/2022/responsive-web-design/.
After completing this, I plan on doing a course on JavaScript and Data Algorithms or possibly back end development.
So far I am loving it.
As with anything else, I am using my calendar to schedule time blocks for this. I’ve created a project in UpNote where I am using their amazing code blocks feature to keep a record of everything I am building through the tutorials. And I am using ToDoist to track different tasks relating to this.
As I am unemployed, I wanted to use the time to learn this skill as quickly as I can and so at present I am aiming to devote around 10-15 hours a week to this endeavour. As I go, I will be sharing the fruit of my labours.
