Most of the time we like to do what is easy or comes naturally to us. The reason why I decided to learn how to code was because I wanted to challenge myself to do something outside my comfort zone. I’ve always been curious to learn about things in tech because it amazed me that all these new things were being built all the time and changing the way we live our lives. Having not explored anything tech related I decided it was not for me (before even trying it) and went with what was immediately in front of me. So began my studies in the Social Sciences. This didn’t work out well because I didn’t feel like there was a need for me to put in much effort because the requirements were to memorise concepts with little room for creativity.
After some time of not knowing what I wanted to do with my time I decided to explore the world of tech and started working through a book about web development during lockdown. Building something from scratch was very rewarding and the challenge kept me interested. After using some free resources on the internet I discovered that there was so much more to learn. The skill of coding can be valuable to bring meaningful change to people’s lives. Everything is easily available because of tech and I wanted to be able to contribute to the development of software that has a positive impact on people’s lives.
I started doing projects in Python and Java and learnt about arrays, lists, dictionaries and for loops. The first time I tried a for loop it took me a week to figure out what was going on, but once I understood the concept it feels ridiculous that I struggled so much. Coding is not always simple and needs you to understand what you are doing to use the principles in different contexts. This has kept me interested and wanting to keep working on projects. At the moment, I’m looking to keep learning more about the world of tech and gaining more knowledge in software development to one day be a valuable member of a software development team. Leaving my comfort zone has been rewarding and opened up a world of new possibilities.