What I Wish I Knew Before I Learned to Code
The questions that held me back
I’ve been “coding” since I was a child. I didn’t think I was doing anything remarkable; I thought HTML was common knowledge back in the era of AOL 3.0 and Geocities. I used to spend hours creating websites (and graphics to adorn them), even though my AOL account had a time limit (thanks, parental controls) and I could only work on my websites for an hour a day.
If I couldn’t figure something out, I created a workaround. I had a workaround for everything. Looking back, I really pushed HTML to its limits.
HTML made sense to me because I could see my work evolving as I added new lines of code. It was self-explanatory.
But like many children, I eventually forgot all about this hobby and moved on to other ventures.
As a teenager, I worked a summer job in IT… by accident. I had been hired to remove staples from documents to prepare them for scanning, but I always had free time, so they would throw extra projects my way. My supervisor would print out pages and pages of SQL and ask me to find the mistakes and correct them manually. It felt self-explanatory, too, so I did it with ease. Looking back, I have virtually no memories of what the code was expected to do, but I remember learning the syntax and finding typos all over…
