What was it like Writing Code for the First Time?

hey guys in this vlog I'm gonna talk about the very first time my real code way back in 1994 I wrote my very first web page in 1994 because my brother came up to me and said you know you should set up a website and I said to him what's a website you understand in 1994 the web was really new to most people compared to today there was a very small number of websites and in fact when I put up my first website I had one of the very first web sites in the world and I had one of the very first websites with images back in those days most of the websites websites put out by universities text only for academic communications so it was a brand new field and nobody knew what to make of it famously at that time the CEO of Microsoft bought a there's web thing is just a fad that's Bill Gates even Bill Gates thought it was just a fad and I remember talking to a good friend of mine about six months eight months later we're thinking to ourselves you know this Web thing it might turn into something a board it might turn into something important anyway so I'm walking in to the whole new world of coding I was not in ered in my background in fact I studied design photolithography layout and then I was in the import-export business of water purification products and rare fish for public exuse aquariums and collectors so I wasn't exactly a tech oriented type of dude but I saw the value in learning to code even in those days even when people weren't sure what was going to happen I just knew in my gut that this web thing was going to be important so I started to learn the basics of writing code in those days there wasn't such a thing as a Dreamweaver a front page' wasn't a web design software there was no pad that was it you just wrote code so I bought a book on web design while HTML and I just started to learn the basics now back in those days a shell was very very simple compared to today but the same basic rules are in place CSS was a dream there's no such thing as CSS so in terms of styling we had to rely heavily on images we used to like gifts in JPEGs in those days well I'm speeding up a little bit in the early days we didn't even use too many gifts and JPEGs because gif and JPEG I don't think was a support until mosaic - I think that browser was any out it was this text layout so back in those days to make a website look good you would just use basic typographic rules and stir in terms of heading was in paragraphs and having good sentence structure by the way these rules still apply to today right if you don't have well laid out texts good alignment it's not gonna look good despite how fancy your images are anyway I digress so what I want to do in this video I just want to go over the feelings that I had at that time I remember first thing because of such a new thing coding so new and alien to me that a lot of uncertainty you hit there you hit the ground and you're starting to write code even simple HTML code and of course back in those days you didn't have the resources that you have today to make learning this stuff easy so I had to learn from pure geeks which is always problematic because geeks don't know how to teach typically and there was nobody quite a teaching background who was really teaching code at that time so I had to learn from the from books or the white papers and the docs and and I put it together you know I put it together but there's always a lot of uncertainty when you're learning anything new especially something that's so foreign to you that coding was so foreign to me but what you got to do in those situations you just got to remember to go remember to go remember that things do take time fortunately for me I had decent business experience at that time a few years and lots of martial arts experience I remember with martial arts that there were certain movements and certain techniques certain concepts are very very difficult for me understand in grasp at first in fact some of these concepts took time before I really understood them and knowing that I apply that experience to my coding when I was learning to code for a first time it was very alien to me and I just knew that with iterations going back working on it on a consistent basis I knew that in a short period of time things will clear up and I would begin to understand the broader concepts now again fortunately because my business and martial arts background I knew the key to the whole thing was to get to the basics understand the basic concepts well an understanding the framework around the code that I was writing in those days was HTML and a bit of JavaScript so it's a while Jeff school didn't come until I think 1995 anyway you did so when you're approaching code for the first time whether it be a programming language like JavaScript Python PHP Java whatnot or whether it be just a simple markup language like HTML or styling language like CSS you gotta have to just be patient with yourself and give yourself time to learn it because you're gonna have these anxieties there's going to be resistant but the brain is resistant to change especially as you get older and so how you make it less resistant is that you give your brain daily exposure to whatever it is you want to learn so whether it be martial arts HTML CSS JavaScript Python PHP Java C sharp doesn't matter Swift what you want to do is you want to explode expose your brain expose yourself to this stuff on a daily basis in fact that's how and why I designed my learning sass by learning software's to do web by design understanding that so that the idea is you come in you do a quick lesson in five six minutes you answer some quiz questions that drive it in and then you may do want one or two others if you want you may do many if you want or you just do one or two and you leave and you come back the next day you do maybe just one and what happens and then the next day you do another two they etc okay what happens is that as you continue to expose yourself to the coding you're you're getting your brain used to the idea hey this stuff we're seeing this every day we better learn this so literally what happens is your brain physically starts changing - to rewire itself to make itself more capable of learning how to code and to coding it literally happens that way so as I said in a recent video the key to learning this stuff is frequency of exposure meaning a little bit every day goes a long way better to learn ten minutes every day than to spend one day and working on it for an hour so keep that in mind so what happens once you start learning how to code what's the next step what's the next feeling well you start feeling excitement because you start realizing that by putting a little bit of effort you're unlocking this whole world this whole different way of thinking because what you'll see as you become more coding savant more programmer aware if you will you're going to start seeing how software is developed you're going to start understanding a different way of thinking and it really opens up different possibilities and this very structured and logical way of thinking will improve your problem-solving skills your organizational skills it will just give you a different perspective on things that's what I found personally and in fact what I learned from martial arts I applied to coding when I learned from coding I applied to my business did I apply to martial arts maybe not so much it's but there was a lot of things a lot of lessons a lot of the lessons and a lot of the way of thinking that I learned as I learned how to code you found it really helped me in other aspects of my life as well so what's exciting when you first learn how to code number one as you see that a different way of looking at things number two you see you have a very powerful skill set that you're you you are developing it's like getting a new superpower to by putting in your toolbox that you can leverage in life and business and Cody software etc I say number one you need you know good communication skills written in verbal you need good interpersonal skills as well so you know how to speak to people in a way that they don't mind speaking to you number two of course you need good technical skills good coding skills they sort of go hand in hand and in fact I was talking to a business suit teacher who teaches at college he teaches business and he's teaches his students what they should learn at least the basics of the web stack the basics of coding because he realizes that modern-day entrepreneurs have to learn how to code and I've spoken about this how important coding is in modern business and anybody any entrepreneur who knows at least the basics of coding is gonna have a tremendous advantage when they go out there and try to compete with other people who don't understand the tech don't hide from the tech it's a small hurdle to get over it quickly and you get over it quickly and they know it's going to open up this huge world and then you're gonna be pretty excited because you're gonna see a lot more opportunities that you wouldn't see otherwise so think of it this way I'm gonna use a bad analogy here if you were blind you couldn't see you can only perceive the world through you know you're hearing any other senses but soon as you open up your eyes also and you see the word a whole different light and same thing with coding when you open up your coding nerd eyes also needing to start seeing things through a whole different perspective you're gonna say you know there's a situation here where maybe if I write a web app here or maybe if I write a mobile app here or maybe if I apply some AI here with Python maybe we can solve a business problem there you see I'm going with this but if you don't understand what you can do with code in the first place it's gonna be hard for you to identify these opportunities out there so even if you're not the one writing the code just having that understanding is going to open up your eyes to a whole bunch of possibilities so it was for me back in 94 very exciting to see what coding can do so I wrote my first website and I started getting traffic on the site even at an even at that early stages of the web and as a result of the website is a direct result I was able to open up markets in Europe and in Asia Singapore Hong Kong and other places because the website gave me a platform to the rest of the world and that's where it's really exciting about this technology where I talked about how coding is gonna is it's going to give you a lot of opportunities it's a super tool and this is just one example even back in those days when the whole business application of the web and internet was still quite young it opened up a few opportunities for me just a quick and adult quick story to give you some perspective so back in those days the challenges were different that websites were simpler in terms of what you've got and you had to do a lot more hacking because the technology wasn't as mature as it is today thing you'll learn in business every technology every business sector if you will will go through stages of rapid development and then finally it will sort of level off where you don't see too many technological innovations in the business so back in the early 90s that's when the web was just starting so for several years you just saw this huge a change things are changing so quickly that's why books that were three years old or terribly out-of-date this has changed since I would say about I say about 2012 the web stack has really stabilized with html5 and css3 and for the most part JavaScript it's very stable and that's just normal in every industry I don't think you're gonna see major major changes in the web stack in the web space in these programming languages for a while simply because we've reached a level of productivity maturity it's kind of like smartphones right what's the difference between a smartphone from two years ago or three years ago versus the latest one today it's not huge anymore in the early days it would be leaping balance every year but these days it's very very like iPhone 8 vs iPhone 10 iPhone 7 iPhone iPhone 10 not a big difference same thing Samsung S 8 vs s7 and it's night minor incremental improvements at best same thing with the programming languages by the way same thing with the frameworks bright by the way we've reached the level of plateau anyway going back to my original story back in those days we really had to had to hack things out and now there's all kinds of Kluge's and it's like like killer sites calm is the I've been managing that site running that site twice 1819 years now but it was originally founded by a guy who wrote a book called creating killer websites which was the best-selling book of his time on web design was actually the second best-selling book on Amazon I think in 97 and he got famous because in that book he taught people how to use transparent one pixel gif images to be able to move fonts around and to just fine finely tuned images now these days thank thank thank the Lords thank the nerds we can do this with CSS of course very easily with padding margins but with in those days we didn't have any of those tools so there's always hacks I just mentioned the one pixel gift so all that said my claim to fame while wasn't a claim to fame but I got a lot of accolades back in those days again was 95 because I had one of the very first websites that had a photo and I put up a photo of a fish very colorful fish and because I could optimize that photo so it wouldn't doubt it wouldn't take two hours to download in those days nobody had a high speed internet it was like it was very slow I was like the King I was the king of the I was king of code because I could put up a nice fish photo anyway just a little perspective they were hectic days in the 90s and early 2000s in terms of how things were evolving and changing fortunately for you guys the technology has stabilized it's much easier now to get things done a little bit of code takes you a long way and the possibilities in terms of building websites writing code writing JavaScript writing Python writing PHP any language not anything most languages anyway are huge now and I think we have a lot more to go in terms of the innovations that can come out and in the future of logs I'm going to be talking about that with some people I know who have companies that are AI based AI and they're doing some interesting things three different sectors meaning three different industries they're all applying AI one guys playing AI combined with Ruby rails one guy's applying AI with PHP laravel the AI is all done with Python by the way in all three cases and then the third guy is doing AI with PHP and I think a custom a custom framework which is interesting anyway three different people applying AI all written in Python the AI is but they work with other languages and frameworks so one guys rails Ruby when two other guys are PHP anyway Wow long-winded tangent filled vlog I hope you found it interesting though

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 4,453

Rating: 4.9444447 out of 5

Keywords: learning to write code, learning to program, learning programming

Id: h2DU8JS0J4w

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2018