How I learned to code at age 10.
I guess this story starts when I was about 10 years old, that’s right, 10. I had asked my father to build me my first website. I was told that my FirstLastName.com was registered as a domain name. My father also had his first and last name registered as a .COM where he hosted a small “About Me” back in the early 2000’s, completely with now tacky animated .gifs and flaming text and background. A quick search on WaybackMachine.org gives me a quick nostalgic trip as I rediscovered this digital relic that was my dad’s personal web page over a decade ago. Oh how far we’ve come with CSS…
Being the excited and eager 12 year old that I was, I asked if I could have my own website. At the time I had no idea what HTML, CSS, or JavaScript was. All I knew was that the internet was this magical place, and I wanted to plant my own flag onto it. Being the sensible and reasonable person he was, he shut down the idea immediately. Lucky for me, I had the world’s greatest organizer of information the planet has seen then or since… Google!
I remember clearly, exactly what I had typed into that wonderful blank text box before I clicked “Google Search”, I had typed “How to make a website”. That simple Google search led me to a link that explained the basics of how HTML worked and how the browser can interpret this easily human written code into a language that the computer can understand as instructions and return in the form of a web page. My first website code was simply:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<H1> Welcome to Julian’s Website! <H1>
</html>
That was about it. Keep in mind this wasn’t hosted anywhere other than an offline folder on my desktop titled “website”. The only one who could see this was me when I opened the HTML file in Internet Explorer.
The website would simply say “Welcome to Julian’s Website!” in a rather large and bold text with a default font and the text would align to the far left of the site against a completely bare and white background.
The amazing thing though, was that in a matter of about an hour or two, I had learned to write my first piece of code at the age of 10 years old.
This led me on a path of further persistence with coding at an early age, before I knew it I had learned the ropes of building decently designed websites with HTML for structure and CSS to give it some design. By around age 13 I was building websites for friends and family. I even built the website of a musician who starred in an Adam Sandler movie.
To this day, I am still learning how to code and have recently begun learning PHP in order to create dynamic content on the web. All of this was possible because of freely available information I found on the internet.
