Software is my Garden, Code is my Seed, Data is my Sun

This week, in celebration of National Coding Week, we’re featuring blogs from our new Mayden Academy students. Today, we hear from Lucia…
To me, developing is the most logical of linguistics. Punctuation forms more clearly delineating boundaries here than ever did the Oxford comma, while grammar becomes if-this-then-that among other such sensible steps, and the courtesy of paragraphing is replaced by the commendable practice of annotation.
However, beyond the delights of a visibly straightforward vocabulary (which is a heavenly relief to anyone who may have struggled with such constructs as the past participle in French lessons), to me coding is above all an opportunity for creation. In the same way that the banana shares part of its very essence – part of its DNA or rather its genetic code – with the human and the mouse, so the webpage you may be reading this on at this very second shares the essence of such sophisticated dreams as Asimov’s Machines. It is, if you like, an electronic version of biology. But the metaphor fails in the aspect of evolution.
I cannot begin to explain how vast I understand to be the connectivity and reach of both programming languages and the programmers themselves. The rapid growth this promotes is immense. The internet – all computer technology in fact – has gone from ape to neanderthal overnight, muddled its way to sapiens over the course of a few hours and is well on its way to becoming homo superior. As we (and it?) learn more, endless answers provide scope for even further questions and with that the solutions we come to are ever more complex.
In fact it is this complexity which I believe will provide me with a never-ending challenge. In the same way that some people pore over sudoku and glow at the long-awaited completion of a particularly tough statistical problem (or, if numbers aren’t your thing, perhaps at 3am on a Wednesday you finally got past that one level in the game you bought last week), I will always flourish best and find perpetual purpose in the face of a problem to which I can reason out and build a solution. Additionally, of course, there are as many tools as there are uses and more of both are built every day.
So you ask me why I want to learn to code. A diorama of languages to form virtual building blocks that defy the scaffolding of the day-to-day world, to keep me absorbed and stimulated for the rest of my life… Can you believe people pay us to do this?
Lucia, Mayden Academy