Around spring of 2021, my pianist friend and I decided to try learning coding. We were both very burnt out from online teaching and well… everything (still in the throws of the pandemic 😢), and were looking for other things to do and learn. Two or three times a week, we’d go to an outdoor bar in downtown Austin, grab a beer, open our laptops, and just hash away. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing or what we were getting ourselves into, but I do look back fondly on those evenings!
We worked through 2 courses together:
- Harvard CS50 - an online introductory course to computer science, taught by David Malan1. Don’t let the word introductory fool you here - the course takes you from humble beginnings coding in C (yes, C, the language from the 70’s) all the way up to building a full-stack stock portfolio app in Python. Starting with a low-level language like C is no joke and can be really frustrating at times, as you’re working ‘close to the metal’ and dealing with raw memory among other things. But I can see the reasoning for starting there - it made us appreciate and understand what higher-level languages (like Python and JavaScript) were doing under the hood!
- The Odin Project - an online course focused on full-stack web development. This was my introduction to the big three: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Odin was a lot more “fun” than CS50, simply because with web development, you get to really see the results of your labor in real-time: it’s right there in your browser! The first assignment was to make a clone of the Google homepage - you can see my attempt here, which also features my very first GitHub commits. I loved the laid-back pace of the course too: if you wanted to stop and dive in to something that piqued your interest, it gave you the resources and encouragement to do that.
It was an ambitious agenda for sure, but we did somehow manage our way through a lot of CS50 together. With the Odin Project, I got about half way and then I strayed, as I really wanted to start building some of my own projects. To be continued…
Footnotes
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David Malan is an amazing teacher. The way he breaks down complex topics, makes compelling demonstrations, and just exudes passion for his field is wonderful, and a masterclass for fellow teachers. If you’re interested, here’s a recent video of him doing his thing: