So, I am a beginner on coding. Started from CS50 ( well, I haven’t finished the final project yet as I want to learn more about building a website first) and just completed the Responsive Web Design Certificate.
My major is not related to computer science but I am quite interested in coding. Although I would like to, I’m not sure whether I will be able to get a job or make income from it.
I think the reason why I feel afraid of tell my friends about what I am learning is because I am not sure whether I can commit to the end or not. Landing a job also seems very far away.
I worry that my friends will judge me “Why are you wasting your time to learn something that is totally unrelated to your field”. Maybe I will want to tell them about it when I can build something worthwhile one day.
I have no troubles talking to internet strangers about it though. It’s just my friends that I feel embarrassed to talk to.
Just want to know, am I the only one who feels like this? Is it weird to feel like this? Is there a way to overcome this?
(Sorry for being a bit whiny. I am still very interested in coding, and will keep on learning.)
Well, coding is about like everywhere nowadays, in every field.
Each jorney begins from the first step. I’m a new in this field also, coming from totally different background.
I do understand that learning coding today- is like something fundamental. coding is all around us
getting job or making income? you have heap of options: freelancing, full time jobs, remote jobs and so on.
on the contrary, learning coding by yourself in my opinion its the best way, much better than being fed from a spoon ( and pay for it also)
Believe in yourself and don’t be shy of telling that you learning coding! It’s a wonderful jorney that I began by myself not a long time ago. once it was “geekish”. Today, its everywhere.
I started code in school and I went to a language school where we did not study science fields; no maths, no physics, no chemistry, and absolutely no programming. While I am good at the field I studied in, I always got a better sense of satisfaction from coding.
Programming is the future and coding literacy is soon going to become just as important as computer literacy. You know how hard it is to explain to the elderly how to use a computer? Yeah, well computers are all around us. If the emergence of AI continues, we will soon be explaining to older generations how coding works so that they don’t get spooked by AI and emergent technologies.
I applaud you for learning coding! It’s definitely a good skill and knowledge to have even if you may not pursue it profesionally. Just so you know, a lot of academics use programming in their daily lives for data analysis and writing scientific journals and the grand majority of them have no degree in CS!
No matter where you go with it, it’s not going to hurt you to learn, any more than learning English, Math, tennis, guitar, or any other skill. For sure, programming will give you deeper insight into these shiny black boxes that surround us in this strange, modern world.
You should never be ashamed of learning something new. If your worried about how people might react to what your learning, then you might be succumbing to a form of “peer pressure”. If it interests you enough to learn it, go learn it. There are a lot of other ways to waste your time, learning and improving yourself isn’t one of them.
Thank you for your encouragement. My background is very similar, no science, no math and had a language degree. Plus I am almost 30, so I feel like I am lacking the confidence. I am always curious to know how computers work and I wish I could start a bit earlier.
It is! I studied CS in university so I guess that’s somewhere you can’t relate but I still wouldn’t give up. There is a field called Human-Computer Interaction and it studies technology from the perspective of other disciplines; psychology, linguistics, sociology, arts, you name it. You could check it out and see how your own education is relevant in HCI
I’ve recently come up with “The web is the new world, to conquer it you need to know it’s language”
I am studying to be a chemist.
JavaScript let me personalize my experience in many web services that have an API, like automatizibg some things, or personalize their look - with JS, or CSS custom user styles, etc
Python let me automatize other stuff, make some calculations easier, create scripts etc
You are learning them to conquer this new world, even if it is not for a job, even if it’s just for fun… also it keeps your mind young and trained. Like learning a language - why am I even learning Japanese if I don’t think I will go in that part of the world? because it’s fun, it’s a challenge, and my brain gets its daily exercise, you can use same argument for programming languages.
At this time the thing I have noticed is that I have trained myself to google stuff: I want to do this thing in excel… but I don’t know how. Let’s google it!
once you do that daily with programming challenges you tend to do it with everything. Sometimes it ends with “let’s call a professional”, sometimes you can do it yourself. (like, when my car has issues… that I can’t fix. but I google first!)
Google-fu is a real skill that programming helps train.
