I’ve been struggling with keeping up with my blog posts, not because I haven’t been working on my project, more so with having to write about the process and experience after the fact. Regardless, here I am — better late than never is what I always say!

My last post was about the Hackathon that I attended, and my post today is a kind of follow up to that. One of the people that I met at the Hackathon recommended that I check out Hello Processing to get started with my journey through code. I did it about a month ago, but found that my brain was too jumbled to pay attention to the video, so I re-did it tonight. To summarize, Hello Processing is a program that was presented by Code.org to introduce the basics of coding, with specific attention to visual arts. It is a one hour program that explains what lines of code are, how to run code, functions, variables, shapes, colours, animations and conditional  statements.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been excited by the fact that I know a lot more about code than I originally thought; I thought it was completely foreign to me, and that’s why I chose to learn about it. But the more I learn about it, the more I learn about the syntax within the language of code, the more I realize how relevant it is, and how relatable it is to much of what I have learned in the past in statistics for Social Sciences. Everything uses code in one way or another, but in things like Paint (rip), Tetris, and relevant search suggestions on Google, code is obviously being used, just not always understood.

So far, I am finding that learning code is similar to learning other languages. There are the certain rules, formats, syntax and structures to follow — sometimes there is not always a reason for the rule or exception, you just need to remember it, and I guess that’s okay. For example, when you speak French, there is something called BRAGS, which stands for Beauty, Race, Age, Goodness, and Size. Generally, when you are communicating, if the describing word falls in the BRAGS category, then it is placed before the noun (large foot/grand pied) not after the noun (foot large/pied grand) — because the latter just doesn’t make sense. Coding is very similar, in following a specific structure, or having guidelines and rules that apply. Once I realized that, it became much easier to learn about, because I found it a 1,000,000,000x more relatable; so I feel like I can actually engage with it now.

I think that’s all for now, as it’s getting pretty late, but before I go, I was hoping to hear from you a little bit! For those of you familiar with code, have you checked out any of the courses offered at Code.org? Any recommendations? Are there any other programs you’ve used for the basics of code? For those of you not familiar with code, have you ever thought about learning it? Is there somewhere in your own life that learning code might be beneficial? Feel free to share your experiences and ask questions; I’d love to hear from you!

Ciao for now.