My role as a programmer isn’t nearly as glamorous as one part of this video makes it, showing a relaxed work environment with several more people in an open place and places to play games, etc.. It is, however, very fulfilling and does make me feel like I have magic powers.

If a person were to come to me and express interest in pursuing learning to code but had some misgivings, I’d tell them the following, and it’s similar to what I’ve been told before.

Coding is about solving problems, sometimes in creative ways. The syntax is secondary and can be learned. If you know one language but don’t know another, it’s easy to learn (relatively speaking) because you’ll already have a grasp of the types of things you want to do. Maybe OR is expressed as “II” like in Javascript or as simply “OR” like in Coldfusion. That doesn’t matter so much as knowing when you want to tell a program: If this OR that, then do something.

I never really thought of myself as an analytical person until I learned programming. As the beginning of the video says, it really does teach you how to think.