Why I Want to Code

This week, in celebration of National Coding Week, we’re featuring blogs from our new Mayden Academy students. Today, we hear from Connor…
I’ve been interested in computers for as long as I can remember. Whenever I’ve experienced problems with a computer, I’ve always been curious and patient in taking the time to figure out the issue, rather than taking it out into the yard and shooting it, which is how my dad preferred to fix things! The more problems I tried to solve, the more I learnt and the more fun I had.
The first time I ever wrote code was in a class at school. I chose to take programming lessons every Thursday afternoon to learn very simple coding in the language, BASIC. It was something I enjoyed and I started to do it in my free time at home as well.
At this point, I wasn’t really thinking about coding as a potential career. It was something I enjoyed, but didn’t take it very seriously. I watched the film Social Network and found myself very eager to start learning how to properly code so that I could build a website. I thought it was cool, and having a skill that allowed you to create something from nothing really appealed to me. So I set to work developing my HTML knowledge and built a website. I kept this running until the start of 2015 but got bogged down in other studies.
Throughout my studies I was working hard, but I was not fully enjoying my time. I was not creating anything either. This is my motivation to learn to code: I love to create things. Coding can make an idea become reality, it can be shared with the masses and you can tweak it until it’s perfect – until it’s exactly what you wanted to make. This, I think, makes coding unique and an absolute joy to work with. I also love to think logically and to problem solve on a day to day basis.
My goal in coding life is to be able to have an idea, to plan it out on paper properly and to not even have to think about writing the code because it’s become natural to me. A similar process to what I am doing right now: typing my ideas but not having to think about the next character I type, because it just flows… 
Connor, Mayden Academy