{"id":2298,"date":"2012-01-01T23:20:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T04:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/?p=2298"},"modified":"2012-01-01T23:52:51","modified_gmt":"2012-01-02T04:52:51","slug":"learn-to-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/2298\/learn-to-code","title":{"rendered":"Learn To Code"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If learning to program is even a minor goal for you,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/codeyear.com\/\">Code Year<\/a> (via\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/inessential.com\/2012\/01\/01\/code_year\">Brent Simmons<\/a>) might be just the encouragement you need. They promise to email you on a weekly basis with coding lessons to help you achieve your goal.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m one of those computer programmers who downplays the difficulty of the profession, because &#8220;if I can do it, anybody can do it!&#8221; On the other hand, I have faced challenges that made me question whether I&#8217;m vaguely qualified for the job. What it boils down to is that programming is both incredibly simple and impossibly hard, like so many important things in life.<\/p>\n<p>There was a time when nobody knew how to write literary prose. The geniuses who invented it shared their special tool with a few friends, and they relished in their private, elite communications. Eventually monks, politicians, and\u00a0academics joined the club. Now, we judge a society&#8217;s overall level of intellectual advancement by the literacy rate: the percentage of people who have learned to read and write.<\/p>\n<p>Literacy isn&#8217;t about becoming a Hemingway or a Chabon. It&#8217;s about learning the basic tools to get a job done. I think programming \u2014 coding \u2014 is much the same. You don&#8217;t have to be the world&#8217;s best programmer to develop a means of expressing yourself, of solving a problem, of making something happen.\u00a0If you&#8217;re lucky, you&#8217;ll be a \u00a0genius, but you start out with the basics.<\/p>\n<p>Long ago, it would have been ridiculous to assume a whole society could be judged by its ability to read and write prose. It feels ridiculous now, to assume that we might use computer programming as a similar benchmark. Yet it may happen.<\/p>\n<p>Did you always mean to learn another language, but never did? By all means, learn Spanish, French, or Chinese. But learn to code, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If learning to program is even a minor goal for you,\u00a0Code Year (via\u00a0Brent Simmons) might be just the encouragement you need. They promise to email you on a weekly basis with coding lessons to help you achieve your goal. I&#8217;m one of those computer programmers who downplays the difficulty of the profession, because &#8220;if I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2298"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2317,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions\/2317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}