Why I’m Learning to Code

Ajoke Emekene
Devcenter Square Blog
4 min readMay 5, 2017

Last week, a friend of mine asked me this “Why invest so much time learning something that you may not do full time?”

Well, let me give you a bit of background. I’m a HR practitioner and not just that I practice HR, but my first and second degrees are both in HR, so you can understand the line of questioning. I told my friend that I would reply on Medium, so here’s hoping he reads my answer. I’m going to give 5 reasons why I’m learning to code.

1..I love solving problems: that’s the number one reason I decided to take a stab at coding. It gives me such joy to know that I went through a challenge and solved a problem. This is precisely what coding is about. You start with a question and then you end up with something ridiculously unbelievable ( lol that’s​ more ideal, right now I just end up with lines of code, that may not run).

2. I’m lazy: Yes, many times I tell people this and they think I’m kidding. I do not like tasks that make me do repetitive work. I love short cuts and I definitely do not like stress that’s unrelated to my core interests. Sometimes I think I’ll get found out at work. I’ve managed to scale through so far though, and I think I’m doing all right. How does this relate to coding? well like they say it takes a village of automated tools to help a lazy girl achieve her goals ( nobody says actually — lol I made that up). If I can build the tools that’ll make my life easier then I will.

When you are asked to do something you absolutely do not like.. lol why me!!

3. The demand for coding is rising: I was listening to a session by Lauren Blake a Stanford MBA Student making the case for people to learn to code, she drew an analogy that struck at the heart of this. Remember when typing started and some people had to be ‘typists’ ? I remember when at least in my junior secondary school people had to take a ‘typewriting’ course and had to take short hand in order to write faster.. well as you know with the rise of computers the demand for typing went up and everyone now needs to type. Imagine employing someone to type for you today? You would hardly find an organization today with a role just for typing up documents… Now I’m not saying that coding will become typing, but the truth is the demand for coding keeps rising. The reason is that technology has the potential to make all aspects of our lives easier and it simply would not cut it to leave it all to computer science majors and engineers.

I hated the noise these things made.

4. Everyone has a perspective: In a Udacity lesson I watched, I remember a doctor sharing his experience of building an idea to connect heart attack patients to first aid persons before the ambulance arrived. Imagine how useful this technology would be in a society like ours where there is almost no emergency response. Well he had a team of college students working on it. I know that not everyone has a few thousand dollars lying around to hand out to a developer to build their idea, hence the need to learn to code. I have ideas and so do many other people. Plus if you use some of the painful tools I use everyday, you would see why this is important to me. Tools whose interface can literally make you cry and wonder if Material Design exists. You may not learn every single thing about the language you need to use, but like Lauren said learning code syntax can make you a code collector, and riding on the back of giants , you can build awesome things.

My face every time I have to add new candidates to our recruitment portal. Trust me, it’s like we are back in 2002.

5. Speaking code lingo can help you communicate better with the people helping you build your idea. One MBA program I found, has an amazing curriculum in Management and Design. You would think that they would include nothing about code because they are training people to be managers right? Wrong! They have a whole module that they teach students Ruby on rails. How cool is that? I think too cool.

All this to say, the resources are available for free. We can all learn to code. Yes you may not need it right now, but if you are interested or there’s a problem you think code can solve, there’s no barrier. Not age, not background and definitely not gender. I’m trying to make it happen for me. Would you try for you?

Here is a link to the MBA program mentioned. — Check out programming design.
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/programs/full-time-mba/mmm-program/curriculum.aspx?filters=

A link to the talk by Lauren Blake

A link to Android Udacity Basics Course

Finally, who knows, I may actually become a full time mobile developer :)

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Ajoke Emekene
Devcenter Square Blog

Trying to find my place. I’m very keen on problem solving. #HarryPotterFan Alert! Design is magic, and making life easier is the reason we make magic happen.