I’ve always been somewhat curious about coding and have more recently been fascinated by the fine minds that work in this space and why they want to work in this space, looking at that god-awful black screen rammed with line upon line of unfamiliar looking text which to most is nothing short of punctuation chaos. For me it was enough to bring on a migraine.
That was before I drunk the coding kool-aid.
On many occasions in journalism jobs I’d cautiously approach the IT area with an impending sense of doom knowing whatever I asked for would result in them bringing up that 1980s-looking monochrome monitor (with a few clumps of neon text ), while I stood behind frowning and just hoping my front end web problem would go away with their backend witchery.
Clutching my mug of tea with an unfathomable and purposefully clueless look, back then I never gave too much of a hoot about what they were actually doing. It seemed simply too overwhelming, something I could never understand and why would I want to when it wasn't my job.
That was my mindset back then in the days of a roving daily and weekly newspaper hack, until I increasingly started reporting on digital marketing and ad tech a few years ago.
From last click affiliate marketing and attribution woes to programmatic, waterfalling, marketing clouds and Google’s algorithm updates, I knew I’d found a reporting niche steeped in innovation, with technology at the heart of it. Writing about it was one thing but knowing about the back end was another. I asked to start looking at backends of systems, dashboards, trading desks and other varying interfaces to help me understand the day-to-day running of these systems and see what the people I spoke to so regularly were looking at. That’s why, when Decoded's Code in a Day course came to Australia I’d set my sights on giving it a go to break through the ignorance and face the unknown.
First thing first this isn’t about actually learning to be a top notch coder in one day, it’s more about understanding the method behind the madness, breaking down the basics and understanding how those coding cogs turn. All with the aim of being able to more effectively work with tech teams, digital folk and perhaps even find opportunities in digital that you wouldn’t have noticed before.
The description of the course says everyone will build an app that allows a customer to check-in at a single location”. The homemade app I made, where the customer must physically be at a location in order to check, involved checking-in at a set area of the beach - so think geo-targeting and geo-fencing. The idea is that if you are part of a group of friends that regularly meet down the beach each weekend throughout the day, you can see who is there depending on who has checked into your favourite beach spot.
The idea is not to become a coding ninja, but to understand the language.
You won’t drown in curly brackets
From computer behaviour language JavaScript; the language of design CSS, to frameworks; APIs and the importance of GitHub; there’s a whole new language out there that can only help you have better conversations with developers, creatives, tech teams and people working in digital.
"If people don't have the vocabulary to discuss digital, then how can they perform in a digital world? If they don't understand what's going on behind the screen how can they be empowered to make the best use of the technologies on the screen?," head of APAC at Decoded Chris Monk told me.
Learning about coding gives you a window to better understand digital and in an era where a lack of knowledge, specifically in digital, can leave you out in the cold, or even out of a job, this can only be a positive. Surely there’s no harm in opening yourself up to understanding the foundation of the very thing nearly every business’s lifeline depends on – the backbone and lifeblood that is the internet.
It’s worth noting that you don’t spend the day swimming in curly brackets and double forward slashes. The course begins with a history of the web which was a major highlight for me.
From inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee to Steve Jobs, there were plenty of fun facts and quips to help with digesting of coding.
It started with the father of computer science and artificial intelligence Alan Turing, before moving onto poet Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace (right), who created the first algorithm and is often regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a "computing machine", as well as the first computer programmer back in the in the mid-1800s.
She is considered to have written instructions for the first computer program and to have created the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, but the program was never tested during her lifetime. The engine has since been recognised as an early model for a computer. In an industry in which women are not the dominant sex (see here for Melinda Gates on the ‘glaring hole’ in gender diversity), it’s inspiring to know Lovelace had such a key part in the history of computer programming.
Improving digital literacy
We make no bones about the storm marketers are weathering at the moment and the bumpy path some have, given the huge chunks of information, technologies, products, tools and platforms rammed at them in the name of customer
acquisition and ROI.
Navigating the marketers' handbook is impossible (there isn’t one) and while there's a chasm of courses out there, from conversion rate optimisation techniques and privacy compliance tests to taking an online digital transformation 101, there's a lot to choose from.
For more, check out our Q&A with Decoded’s Chris Monk here, who as head of APAC at Decoded heads up the Australian courses. And if you fancy your hand at creating a better app (right) than me, check out Decoded to see when the next course is.