One year ago I never imagined I would study programming! I lived in China and played trombone in a symphony orchestra. None of my friends considered me a techie person! Then 6 months later my wife and I decided to move back to America and I started looking for something new.
My first thought… Use Chinese to get a job! Chinese is a marketable job skill, right?
Here are a couple opportunities I found:
- Sell jewelry to Chinese tourists
- Tutor Chinese part time
These were not the opportunities I was looking for. …but the searching gave me motivation to learn another job skill. This is when I started thinking about programming. Like many people I assumed coding must be very dull and repetitive. Staring at a screen all day and typing…
Here are a few things I learned that changed my perspective on programming:
Repetitive work is for the computers!
Good programming actually avoids repetition in the coding. We write code to make computers do the boring work for us.
Programmers are like detectives
Often programmers can spend hours or days hunting down a single problem and fixing it. While this may be tedious to some people, I enjoy the focus and concentration required for this kind of challenge.
Programmers work in teams
Programmers talk to people!??? …Obviously I hadn’t thought about this much before. It was exciting for me to realize that communication and teamwork are a big part of the job. Now I’m looking forward to meeting and working with many new people in the future!