Return of the casual coder

Christmas Day 1981 and Santa brought me my first personal computer, a second hand Sinclair ZX81. As we couldn’t get any of the cassette games to load, me and my sister’s boyfriend spent the entire evening taking it in turns to ‘type in’ a game from one of the magazines which came bundled with the computer (thanks Santa ;). Of course we were totally deflated come midnight when all we had to show for our efforts was a poxy corner of the screen, left to right moving series of blocks that were just blocky and little else.

We were promised tank wars.

Thus began my vague fascination with programming that, over 30 years later, seems to have been reignited. Granted, my current work may have steered me somewhat, but here I am today, getting to grips with PHP and setting myself the challenge to learn Python. Now in my 40s, the prospect of learning to code (again) is somewhat daunting. I’ve put up a barrier that I almost feel obliged to thanks to my age but there are chinks. Chinks in the guise of rekindled memories. Memories of what turned me on in the first place. Creativity, exploration and problem solving…. Perhaps.

So there it is. I was never very good at it in the first place but in all honesty, that’s not the point. If I can grab a couple of wins and encourage a few others to take the plunge, then jobs a good ’un.