Learning to code? I did it for 2 years – here’s what I learned

I’ve never sworn so much in my entire life. I stared at a computer screen for hours, trying to fix a bug in my app. The cause of the error eluded me, nudging me into a cycle of angst, self-loathing, and keyboard smashing.

The cause turned out to be a typo in a file name.

There were also moments I felt invincible. Like when I wrote my first script and it ran successfully. Or when I deployed my first app to a server with the words “hello world.” Or the time I wrote my first crawler to populate a database. I felt like a god ordering little code minions to do my bidding.

Programming is a drug that made me come back for more despite the initial pain of the needle. And that sums up my two-year experience learning to code.

We made fun of engineers

Like many wannabe techies, I am captivated by the shiny world of Silicon Valley and the power that geeky moguls have.

It’s an amazing turn of events – not long ago I was part of a group that didn’t think too highly of engineers. I belonged to a female-dominated communications faculty in an engineering university. We rolled our eyes at engineers for lacking fashion sense or social skills, for being awkward around women, and for having poor grammar. Someone once remarked that I looked like an engineer – and I felt embarrassed.

This sounds stupid now, sure. But I was in college and unexposed to the real world. “Silicon Valley” meant nothing more than another distant location.

But here’s one thing about me you don’t know – I was once the president of the IT club in secondary school. I picked up HTML and flash, spent my free time playing Sim City 3000, and creating a website about the game. I always had a little bit of geek in me.

I didn’t take long to re-embrace that side of me again. The Social Network came out in my last year of university. I joined Singapore’s nascent startup scene as a tech reporter right after I graduated.

I was exposed to the everyone should learn to code craze that’s about to get crazier. Being a programmer has become cool, and I’d be lying if I didn’t fantasize about it.