Coding Without Boundaries, The Playground Approach

Introduction

Have you ever wondered, how to make a computer program, or just how a program works.. but you just haven’t started coding already?

That’s a question that I made to myself when I was 9 years old. At that time I was playing Minecraft with a mod called “Computercraft”. That mod enabled me to write programs to automate aspects of the game, such as farming, mining or simply opening doors with a password, I took it as a game! And it was indeed very fun. Every program was written in Lua programming language, if you don’t know it, it’s very similar to Python.

That experience aspired me to learn Lua, C# Forms in Visual Studio, C++, Win32 Native Windows Applications, Direct X 9, Unity, Godot and web development languages.

Coding and Education

Generally in school you learn basic principles of coding.. but without purpose. That depends on the Teacher of course, but most of the time it doesn’t look fun, as very few people find joy into generating Fibonacci numbers in C++.

Writing code with a purpose and to have fun made my passion for coding more robust, and I find it actually the best way to learn it, as I find myself more committed to studying the subject and learning more about it to then use it for my own purposes, just like a set of tools that you can use to build stuff.

What the secret to start coding then?

Many people have told me that they don’t know where to start from, as many fear that need to find someone or some institution to teach them to do stuff, but it’s really much more simple than that.

The secret is to have fun by making silly projects and learning by practice. Think of it as a playground, imagine you’re a child and you have a certain set of toys but nobody tells you how to play with them, fueled by curiosity and exploring spirit you try to learn more about the toys and how they work. After that, creativeness and imagination come into play and you find yourself creating your own stories.

Curiosity is a very powerful thing in our human nature, why not use it to our advantage?

Does coding require passion?

I think it does, but to understand if you like it you need to try it first right? Finding what we like is an inner journey, I personally understood very quickly that I loved coding but everyone is different! My only advice is to take your time, and see where the “exploring process” brings you.

What about the theory?

In the beginning theory comes second, as soon as you start you’re gonna find yourself researching how to do X and Y, but that’s exactly what programming is sometimes, a lot of research is involved. Then you will reach a point where you will know how to do stuff and the time put into researching decreases by a lot.

School and education certainly helps by teaching some of the basic theory concepts of software development like OOP (Object Oriented Programming) and algorithms, but it’s still up to you on how to use this informations, and you can learn a lot more about it while working on it than by just studying it.

Some examples of programs I made while learning

Let me just give you an example of a silly program I made when I was learning how to program. The purpose of this program, called “Spammer Prime” was to just literally flood chats on Whatsapp groups and make my friend’s phones crash. It could also be used on Minecraft or any other thing, as it basically emulated a keyboard and it world write and then send by pressing enter, I’ve also setup shortcuts, made a cool UI and had lots of fun making it.

Another example is “Easy Homeworks” which basically was a calculator that wrote down the entire process of converting numbers from one base to another (like from binary to decimal or from decimal to hex.. etc) and I used that program to just copy and paste my homework for school.

This are just some of the silliest ones that I made, but with your own imagination, you could make even cooler ones!

Conclusion

Coding is a form of art, you have a certain set of tools that you can use to make everything you want, just like having a set of brushes and a blank page. It makes your creativity come out and you can get a lot of satisfaction from it when you’ve finished a project.

That’s only my personal advice at least, you decide what to do, the only thing you’re really in control of, is yourself, so if you want to do something, then just do it! Now go, and CODE.

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