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How I Learned Code

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…(or, a mathematician’s adventures in computer programming)

My interest in programming began at a point when I was just completing my 7th year of teaching math at the university level.  I have always had a passion for math but after so much time teaching, I wanted to apply my math skills out in “The Great Wide Open” of the non-academic world.

One day as I sat wondering whether I could possibly become an Actuary or Statistical Analyst of some sort, I suddenly became curious to see if I could learn how to work with computer code and develop that into a career.  After all, I had worked with HTML code in high school. How much could have changed on the internet in 12 years?

<html>
    <head>
        <title>My Webpage</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>Hello World!</p>
    </body>
</html>

Right??

A quick investigation uncovered something I had never heard of called CSS, and after that I quickly stumbled upon a programming language called PHP.  It seemed that my entire math career up to that point had been prepping me to work with code, without my even being aware of it.

I studied PHP and then JavaScript very intently, soon becoming aware of their fundamental differences and getting a glimpse into the essence of why they both exist.  I started to figure out when and how to use the two separately as well as in conjunction, but most importantly how not to use them in conjunction.

echo "<script><?php echo "{{$key}: '{$value}'}"; ?></script>";

…looks like I needed a little bit of AJAX at this point!

What I love about web development is the same thing I love about math – by its very nature it allows us to build and share our own sets of tools for  better efficiency and further discovery.  From a creative standpoint, I also love how writing code involves finding my own solutions while at the same time studying and incorporating existing work that others have done before me.

With the advent of open source software and great platforms like WordPress, diverse communities of people from all across the world can code together to benefit the greater good, and that’s pretty awesome!