I’m going, going … back, back … to coding, coding …

Okay, seriously. How had it been more than a decade since I had coded (excluding those handful of lines of javascript I wrote when personalizing my wedding website back in 2011)? Back in my day of programming, we had the Nokia 8250 in our pockets along with our trusty TI-85 graphing calculator. Our computer processors barely reached 100Mhz, let alone multiple Ghz.

Throughout my career, many people have asked me,”Why did you major in engineering?” I can boil this down to three primary reasons:

• I love gadgets. I used to spend Sunday afternoons with my dad hitting the local Circuit City, just to check out the latest tech. I detasseled corn in the summer (like tech luminary and fellow University of Illinois alum, Marc Andreessen) so that I could afford the latest Sony Walkman, the extra hard drive for my computer, and those few extra minutes to use on my parent’s car phone.
• I wanted to know how these gadgets worked, which is why I went into computer engineering as opposed to computer science — it was all about the hardware to me.
• I won’t “skirt” the obvious. I graduated from undergrad in 2001 and my major was less than 5% female. I’m competitive. I like a challenge. I wanted to prove I could hack it.

So hack I did … through a sea of interesting coursework. My first ever engineering project as a freshman in college was a self-driving car. My self-driving car was about 8 inches long by 6 inches wide and it drove along a black canvas, with the goal to stay in between white lines. My favorite course was one that covered computer architecture and design where our final project was to design a microprocessor using parallel processing.

Even though I thoroughly enjoyed coding, I found myself on the business side of tech pretty early on in my career — and my coding skills had become rusty. The world of coding had grown up. The Nokia 8250 was replaced by the latest iPhone or Android Nexus. 9M+ members joined the GitHub community, which didn’t even exist in the early 2000s. We now live in the land of infinite choices when it comes to programming languages, amazing developer tools (shameless plug for Twitter’s @Fabric here), platforms / OSs and training courses to keep you fresh (@KhanAcademy, @CodeAcademy, @CodeSchool to name a few — or just search on YouTube and you’ll find some amazing videos from leading CS university programs). I recently decided it was time for me to freshen up those skills and get back to coding.

Last week, I took an in-depth training course in Swift (the new programming language for iOS8+) from @BigNerdRanch. I took this course alongside some of my colleagues in the Twitter Product team as well as my Biz Dev & Developer Relations orgs. Leading up to the course, I’ll admit to both nervousness and excitement. To prep, I took a handful of courses online, trying to recall the basics of object-oriented programming. However, unlike those 90s rap song lyrics that were popular back when I was first coding, the fundamentals of programming were harder to recall.

The course itself covered the Swift programming language (variables, constants, enums, optionals, closures and more), building in xCode, using various UI classes to handle animations, gestures and more, as well as storyboarding. Overall, the course was incredibly challenging and moved at a rapid pace — but it was fun to dip my toe back into the world of programming.

Regardless of your role, if you are working in technology, you should have a fundamental understanding of coding. You will encounter developers everywhere. We come in all shapes, sizes, genders, sexualities, races and backgrounds.

• As an operator, you will have a deeper understanding of the work of your colleagues in engineering. You will communicate with them better. You will empathize with your colleagues who are tackling the complexity of coding.
• If you’re in a Business / Strategy / Legal role, coding improves logical thinking. I’ve often compared writing term sheets to writing code. It helps you think through complicated business scenarios (if a then b, else c; do x while z) and think about dependencies between variables.
• If you’re in a Product Management role, you need to be able to have a deeper understanding of development cycles, technical trade offs, as well as possibilities and capabilities that you may have otherwise been unaware of.
• For those in HR / Recruiting, you will be able to source and identify better talent.
• For investors, you will earn credibility with technical founders. In this competitive investing landscape, entrepreneurs don’t just want money — they want smart money that comes with advising, experience & empathy.

As they say “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and neither are “coding skills built (or in my case, re-built) in a week.” Like any language, you must practice and use it frequently. Therefore, I made this vow to myself which is summarized below, in Swift, of course:

var janamal: Person

while janamal.alive == true {

janamal.code()

}

// As long as I’m alive, I will keep up w coding