Everywhere I look at the moment, there are people telling me I must learn to program for the good of mankind.  The Guardian and Michael Gove are well and truly on my case with their special reports on computer science in schools.   This video is pretty inspirational in that it scares me into rushing headlong into a programming course.  If I don’t, I’ll be contributing to the downfall of mankind and I’ll be facilitating the emergence of a terminator-style future.  I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want that on my conscience.

So here I am, doing my Codecademy course.  It’s a free online course and “everyone” is talking about it.  This is a screenshot of me doing quite well in one of the exercises.  There are plenty of exercises where I do pretty badly. 

I’ve no idea what my 3 achievements are for.  Is three good?  So far, the course has talked me through basic Javascript – declaring variables,  arrays, strings and all manner of nonsense.  We have also established that my name is not Sam (part of the if/else exercise).  Reassuringly, there are plenty of people out there tweeting under the #codecademy hashtag about their experiences/suffering.

I’m completely new to this so it’s a steep learning curve and it’s very frustrating at times and there are some awkward glitches on the website.  Don’t think it’s just me because other people seem to be having similar problems. 

So that’s something to look out for.  I’m still committed to getting some level of programming literacy.  Can I tempt you to join me?