Founder of coding school for children reveals her own troubles learning to code

This article is heavily revised from a podcast episode on Speak Up Asia.

Michelle Sun is the founder of First Code Academy, a startup that is teaching children as young as six years old how to code.

Sun learned the value of coding when she wanted to learn how to communicate better with her engineers.

She always excelled in school, so she was quite surprised to find that she actually struggled to learn how to code when she tried to teach herself through books. And it was this struggle that ultimately led her to start her company.

How did you get started in the field?

I realized that in order for me to want to keep doing things in technology and pursue a career in it, I have to learn coding. It’s not like learning code and becoming an engineer, but to understand technology deeply.

So I picked up like 10, 15 books to read and learn coding and thought, “I can learn coding myself.” [But I] realized that, actually, it’s not that easy. I kept bugging my friends to teach me and to debug my code. In the end, I found this program called Hackbright Academy that’s all the way in San Francisco, and they’d teach people how to code like myself.

It’s a full-time, twelve-week program where you go through the basics, and at the end, [you can] build something real and put it online.

Was it challenging for you learning how to code and not being able to grasp it?

So growing up, I never had any difficulty learning stuff at school. So coding was arguably the first thing that I found really hard to learn. In some ways it made me want to overcome this challenge even more, to really discover what is so interesting about it.

So that’s why I wanted to find a community and learn it offline and hands-on instead of staring at a book and fixing it by myself.

What was it about coding that you found challenging? 

Probably the literature. The books out there may have improved over the years, but back in 2011 when I was trying to pick up coding, […] the books that I’d been reading were not really covering the whole spectrum of what it means to code.

So for example, there would be a book on Python. The reason why I wanted to learn Python was not to learn all the syntax. I wanted to build something. Like I wanted to build maybe a Twitter clone, a mini Facebook, a blog, or something. Very few of the books that I was reading actually covered the whole spectrum of how to set up the back end to front end, make it look nice, and put it online.

These things that I mention actually were covered in maybe four to five books. They were all very disjointed and you just needed to know where to look for things. And for someone who’s just starting out, it’s not that easy.

The second thing is that when it comes to coding, a lot of times you have a lot of bugs to start with […]. So you need to know how to find these errors, and as a beginner coder, it’s not that intuitive to look for these errors […].

How did you feel when your first startup didn’t succeed?

What are some of the challenges you faced teaching children how to code? 

Part of your program is also encouraging women to code. What challenges do you face there? 

What would you say to a woman who’s interested in tech, but has to apply somewhere with an all-male team?