How Computer Programming changed my life
The first time I was shown anything having to do with computer programming, it was 1984 and I was in the fourth grade. We spent an hour as a class each week inside the Village Elementary School’s computer lab playing video games. By computer lab, I mean that these were Texas Instrument computers hooked up to television sets. Many of the monitors had color, but of course there was the one in the back of the room which was black and white. I often got that one.
By video games, I am referring to titles such as “Asteroids,” “Donkey Kong,” “Hamburger Time,” and Pac-Man wannabe “Munch-Man.” This was also my rare opportunity to play computers because my parents were not into such technology. But, that’s a whole other story.
So, I was going from week-to-week, hoping to not get the computer with the black-and-white monitor, and also hoping that I’ll be able to play one of the more popular video games, when one Friday the adult who supervised our game-playing activities asked everyone to please refrain from playing video games because we were going to learn something called “BASIC.”
I was really frustrated having to learn something inside a computer lab, but I gradually changed my tune as I learned more about what you could do with BASIC. For example, you could write three lines of code which caused the computer to repeat the same phrase over and over again:
>10 Print “hello”
>20 Goto 10
Later, I would use the same snippet of code while I was killing time at the local Kmart. Sometimes the computers on display would be showing the command prompt, so I would type in the couple of commands I knew.
For my thirteenth birthday, my parents gave me a Radio Shack computer that was so old that there was one just like it on the bridge of the original “Battlestar Galactica.” I kid you not. But, one of the first things I did after firing it up was type in the Print/Goto10 commands and wowed my parents.
While it was limited, I was able to get a lot of mileage out of that TRS-80 Microcomputer. For starters, I learned how to program in BASIC on it. I checked out a couple of books on BASIC from the library, copied in a few of their sample programs, and then changed the programs so they did things that were slightly different. I would enter in the default “Choose Your Own Adventure,” and then customize it.
By high school, I was setting my sights on becoming either a newspaper reporter or a successful novelist. As computers were becoming more common, especially in the newspaper industry, it seemed as though it would be helpful to understand how they worked. But, given my aspirations it seemed that technology, and especially programming, were more of a means to an end.
Fast forward to 1995 during my Sophomore year at Central Michigan University. Park Library had set up a row of computers on the third floor where you could look up information on the Internet. I was instantly amazed by the ability to be able to search for almost anything you wished to on the “World Wide Web.” There were also MUDDS, webchat, and of course email.
I had joined the college newspaper on my first day on campus as a Freshman, but as I learned more about CMU”s technology resources I gravitated towards computers. By my sophomore year I worked as a computer lab consultant. During my downtime, I built a homepage while dabbling in HTML.
While I was working at the computer lab, I lead a workshop on Microsoft Excel. While I was waiting for the workshop to start, I happened to talk to one of the people who had attended. He said that his brother was working for Paramount Pictures building websites. I thought to myself, wow, that sounded like a great job.
I wanted to pursue a minor in computer science, but found the programming classes to be very challenging. Perhaps I just didn’t approach things right, but all I remember was our instructor talking to us at length about phone books, and then asking us to write a program which would store names and phone numbers alphabetically by the following the week. I had taught myself BASIC, but the languages we were working in were a mystery to me. I ended up switching my minor to Sociology.
I did however take a one week business class during the summer on building a website. I’ve always marveled at how little emphasis webpage design was given back then. This class was a little bit of a “good to know, just in case” thing. We used Microsoft Frontpage to build a business website for an orchard.
Fast forward to November 1997. I was working at an Internet Service Provider in Howell, Michigan, called HomeTown Online. I had gotten this job with my degree in Journalism and my practical experience with HTML. My strongest sample consisted of print outs of the personal homepage I had built while I was playing around at the campus computer lab.
Nowadays, I manage a team of web developers for a nonprofit. I always find it fascinating to read their communications between each other because it’s programmer-speak. Perhaps I wish that some of it would somehow rub off onto me so that I would start to understand more of what they’re talking about.
One of my regrets in life is that I didn’t stick it out later with the programming classes. Doing so might have helped make me a little bit more versatile in the job market. The skills I learned from a one week class on building a website and the three years I worked at HomeTown Online weren’t enough to sustain me in the ever-changing world of computer programming. Besides, other than struggling in my first computer programming class I found that I didn’t have the temperament to really get into coding as a profession.
I probably would have never taken the career path that I’m on now if the Internet hadn’t caught on when it did. Either I would have been the job market too soon, and ended up working for a newspaper, or I would have been too late and wouldn’t have had the skills to enter the industry. As it happened, there were no hard rules which said who could or couldn’t build website.
It’s too late for me to learn what I need to in order to reinvent myself as a coder, but I do have enough practical experience to fill other roles, such as project manager and quality assurance technician. I pride myself on being able to exist between both the technical and the non-technical world. A kind of business-to-programmer translator. It also helps to understand how websites and programming works when I’m testing a new feature on our website.
If my son or daughter asked me if they should go into computer programming, I would tell them that it definitely wouldn’t hurt. Even if they didn’t end up coding, there are a lot of professions which require you to do something on the web, and it helps to understand how everything works on the backend. The reason why coders are rockstars now is that line between the non-technical and the technical is blurring, and pretty sure we’ll need people to code for just about everything. So, yeah, it definitely can’t hurt.
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Originally published at docs.google.com.
