The Story of My Journey to Codeguage — Part 1
Getting into programming via a link mentioned in a grade-7 book.
The year is 2018; it’s a classroom as big as an auditorium to address more than a hundred people; the teacher is giving a lecture on De Moivre’s Theorem; all students in the class are busy making notes, some even asking questions, with the exception of one person. He is busy writing content for a course on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
That person is me.
Welcome guys.
After over 4 years of working on my website Codeguage, I’ve now finally got the time and the chance to share with you my humble story.
The story of how I got into the world of computer science, how I managed to launch Codeguage during my college years, how I run it these days, and where I wish to see it in the near future.
To keep the interest there in the whole story (which is quite long), I’ve divided it into multiple parts, as you could probably guess from the title of this article.
In this first part, I’ll talk about how I got into programming by a link in a grade-7 book. So without further ado, let’s begin…
How I got into programming?
Back in the day, when I was in grade 7, we used to have these so-called IT classes.
In them, we used to visit a computer lab in our school and get introduced to some piece of software that was part of the IT course whose exam was to be conducted at the mid and end of the year.
Introduction to HTML4
Now, in the course, we had something called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).
By the way, this was HTML4, and if you ever worked with it, it was an extremely tedious way to write HTML.
We were introduced to the most simplest of elements, such as <p>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>, <b> (for bold text), <i> (for italicizing text), and even <marquee> (deprecated long ago), in addition to basic styling attributes such as bg-color, color, border, etc.
In our visits to the lab, we were tasked with creating given web pages, but only static ones, by understanding their design and then writing some HTML to replicate them.
There was no concept of CSS back then in these lab classes, let alone an introduction to JavaScript.
I still recall that HTML felt alien to me. I wasn’t used to typing < and > again and again. This was my first ever encounter of a computer language, with precise rules and a well-defined syntax to adhere to.
Even typing out a simple and short piece of HTML code took forever. But it was fun, for sure.
I and all of my friends felt as if we had some magical power in our hands to program the computer. (Well in some way, we did have that power 🙂.)
The final year IT exam
Anyhow, in the final year IT exam, we had many topics to cover, including HTML. We had to memorize certain HTML elements, their names, their purposes, certain attributes, and a little bit of definitions, under this topic.
And did I forget to tell you that we also had a pretty nice book for the IT subject, as per our school’s syllabus.
While I was reading the unit on HTML in that book, there was a reference to W3Schools on its very last page, saying that “To learn more, please visit the following link.”
Out of curiosity, as I was already into writing a little bit of HTML from our computer lab visits, I thought, well, let’s give it a try.
A glimpse of HTML5
When I opened up W3Schools’ website, which was extremely different back then, I was actually stunned. HTML was far more complex and useful than what we had been taught in our IT classes.
As I stated before, we were introduced to HTML4 which was a little bit tedious to write. However, on W3Schools, I got to know about something much more neater, simpler and modern — HTML5.
A glimpse of CSS
Going down a little bit, I saw a small snippet demonstrating something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which was a more generalized and much better way to style HTML than those bg-color and color attributes.
And it didn’t end here.
A glimpse of JavaScript
Going down another couple of pixels, I saw something called JavaScript — a language used to add interactivity to HTML.
You could just imagine what I would’ve been going through while seeing all these simple, yet giant, technologies, using which I could create much more spectacular web pages that I had created ever before
Adding to this the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed writing even HTML 4 in our computer labs, I decided to start learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Soon, I learnt PHP, XML and a bit of MySQL and also started to create multiple personal projects.
By the way, these personal projects were only for fun and to improve my understanding of the given technologies. I never created them for a formal portfolio.
And this is how I got into programming — through web development.
I guess this is how most people start programming these days as well, i.e. via web development (in particular, with HTML, CSS and then JavaScript).
To be continued…
So this is it for the first part of this series.
To keep an anticipation element in the story, and obviously keep from writing a 30-minute article, I’ll end it right here.
In the next article, I’ll walk you through how I got into the world of algorithms after coding webpages for more than 3 years.
The story is to be continued…
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