Being the curious teenager I am and wanting to pursue in the career of Software Engineering I wanted to try out programming at an early age. I started programming when I was about the age 12 roughly about three years ago. I could never really grasp the concept of programming or remember all those lines of code, since my mind was still incapable of handling excessive amounts of weird computer languages that consisted of using lots of punctuation not often used for writing books (which was my hobby at the time). I researched everywhere to figure out which language best suited me, I even bought a $20 book called ‘C++ Programming for Dummies’ which I learned wasn’t a very updated nor useful book and I haven’t touched it for the past three years. It still remains sitting lonely in the lounge room cabinet alongside all the other old books. Eventually I figured out to start with HTML. Got the grasp of it, memorized syntaxes, classes, dividers and being in the mind of a twelve year old, I bragged about it - alot. Eventually, being my age I got bored of programming easily since I was distracted by my daily schedule, playing video games.
I stopped programming for about a year or so and started learning about Photoshop. Let me tell you something, if you start programming, don’t ever stop. Why? Well, it’s really hard to back into it once you’ve stopped for a long period of time, sometimes you even forgot how to apply the codes or the whole language altogether. If you ever feel like you’re bored of programming, switch to a new language. Anyways, after learning that Photoshop could be applied to web development languages such as HTML, I started taking interest again but I had completely forgotten how to do it. My computer screen consisted of:
<html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> </body> </html>
And that was all I could remember. I’d sit there constantly looking back through tutorials on w3schools but it was all worth it because I started taking complete interest in another language CSS (Cascade Style Sheets) because it was related to web development. I created my own small private website and started taking interest in other languages. I left programming for about a year due to studying and then I got into programming about two weeks ago.
If you ever, ever, ever feel like learning programming, do it. It is stress-relieving and relaxing. You learn a lot, and you do become smarter, you are able to adapt to information in school more easily and apply it easier. You could end up making a code that will end up being famous, something used in everyone’s daily life, or something that could earn you money. Programming is an incredible tool and once you’ve finished a code you’ve been awaiting to finish, you can never be more satisfied. Here’s a video for programming inspiration created by code.org. Featuring Gabe Newell, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.
