Why I Learn to Code | R100 Series
When I started learning to code, the idea was, “Now I’ll have skills I can just take right out to go get a job!” Apparently that’s not the case. Anyway, I can still study coding, keep that on the backburner, and keep a really nice mix of tech skills cooking.
But the real heart motivation: I love making useful things.
Now, writing can be for entertainment. God knows I love making jokes. But at least entertainment has a “humanity maintenance” purpose, so it’s not useless. It maintains my humanity as the writer, and it maintains the enjoyer; it exercises my deeper human capacities as the writer, and it rototills the enjoyer’s field of imagination.
Coding does something more elementally constructive: it creates tools to get things done. The example I keep going back to is in the “Hundred Days of Coding” LinkedIn post we’re looking at today:
Learning to code isn't only a "find a tech job" thing. It gives you the power to create tools.
One example I'll never forget is from a Python textbook. Once a guy had a job to manually enter data from one format to another format. He created a script to do it and got days of work done in a few hours. He and his colleagues got to take an extra long lunch break.
When I was working at a call center-type place, one of our guys created a script to speed up customer lookup. It was quickly deployed to all our computers. He never got a promotion or anything. Such is life.
One SEO tip is to create a free tool. People share that tool and you get tons of traffic. You could BUY a tool. Or you could create one. Once you know how to create ONE, you could create THREE.
So yeah. Tools.
Data entry and all that are honest work. But they’re also tedious. As long as the work gets done, why not build character somewhere else for ten times the profit? Why NOT get it all done with a script?
Right now I’m pursuing positions in communications. I could write a script to do look at news stories about the organization I’d be working for, or I could create my own social media automation tool.
Now THAT’s a project idea! A DIY social media automation tool.
Anyway, I love building things that are useful.
