There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t
Why I’m learning to code
I remember watching my first ever TED talk. It was by Luis von Ahn, the Guatemalan founder of Duolingo. He said that before the internet, the biggest projects in the world like the pyramids, landing on the moon, the Suez Canal, involved a maximum of about 150,000 people. Post-internet, collaborations have involved over 750 million people! Just imagine what we could achieve if we harnessed that collaborative power to better the world we live in, to revolutionise healthcare, education and our ability to live sustainably…
That’s why I’m fascinated by technology, and that’s why I’m learning to code. It’s Week 1 at Makers Academy, Europe’s #1 Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp. We’ve all been encouraged to blog to document our learning journey over the coming 16 weeks, if for no one else than for ourselves.
I met my fellow cohort of developers-to-be on Monday evening, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re a wildly interesting bunch from all sorts of funky backgrounds. I’m probably no different in that my path to Makers also needs a little explaining. Here’s the ‘in a nutshell’ version: I’ve always been interested in why economic actors allocate resources in the way that they do — be it people, businesses or governments. After studying Economics at university, I started out my career in the City as a Portfolio Manager. I got to travel the globe and visit an eclectic mix of countries, studying their macroeconomic policies in order to formulate investment theses around their currencies. It was incredibly interesting to get to know different cultures at a policy level. However, it also made me think a lot about how our global economy works, and why we are seeing increased social tensions and environmental degradation: our current economic system doesn’t account for how much we create and destroy the communities and environment around us.
That’s when I found On Purpose — a year-long leadership programme in social enterprise designed for young professionals who wish to harness their commercial expertise for good. I spent the latter half of the programme working at Do Nation, an amazing social tech startup that’s on a mission to make sustainable living mainstream. And I absolutely loved it. Nothing beats working amongst a small, talented team, building something you care about, that you think has real potential to scale and make a positive dent in the world.
And that brings me full circle as to why I’m here. As an ‘ideas’ person, I’d like to arm myself with the skillset to turn those ideas into something that resembles something a little closer to reality — I’ve done a lot of ‘thinking’ in my career, but now I want to ‘make, create, build, do’. Thousands of years ago, it was only kings, pharaohs, and emperors who had the ability to solve large-scale problems. Today, that ability has been thoroughly democratised.
And so it begins. I intend on sharing learnings and general musings as I go, from life both inside and outside of Makers, with a particular focus on tech-for-good. Thoughts, questions, challenges are welcomed, and ardently encouraged.
Right, back to my parallel universe of 1’s and 0’s…
