Coding, why we should all try it!
I have been contemplating writing my first LinkedIn article for a couple of days and now I decided to put pen to paper (figuratively of course) and write the following article - I hope you like it!
When you think of computer programming or coding, what do you think of? Perhaps a bunch of students coding the next Facebook in their dorm rooms or a group of physicists performing advanced scientific computations using super-computers at CERN? Either way, I bet most of you feel this is something that the average person would never do. Well, I am writing today to implore you to break this perception and to allow me to reduce the barriers to entry. I intend to write a series of articles that explain when, where and critically how coding can be used in your daily work or private life to boost productivity as well as provide some fun!
Albert Einstein said "The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation" - (or perhaps he didn't https://www.benshoemate.com/2008/11/30/einstein-never-said-that/). These words resonate with me because of my use of programming, particularly in the work-place. Today, I very rarely copy and paste data between files or manipulate or visualize data without using some coding or data tool to do the heavy lifting for me. I know you might be thinking that this requires hours of studying to accomplish this - and you would be right, but I don't want that to stop you from starting. Yes, you might "waste" time in the beginning and it might be faster to do the manual work in that moment but in the long run if you stick with it, you could be saving hours of manual work per week – and having fun whilst doing it! I have no formal training in programming, I learnt everything from websites and "learning-by-doing" and so I know you can do it too! I believe programming changes the way you think about solving problems positively and so I encourage everybody to try.
In the following articles I will outline some basics of computer programming as well as show some examples of when, where and how programming can be used. I will focus on one programming language in the beginning – VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). The reason I will start with this is that almost everybody has access to Microsoft Excel and this means that the barriers to entry are very low. In future articles, I would also like to touch on some other programming languages like Python, C# and JavaScript. The good thing is, once you learn one language and the main principles of programming, the others can be learnt very quickly.
What you can look forward to in future articles:
· Where and how programming can be performed in Excel
· How to write procedures and functions.
· How to write an “If” statement in VBA
· How to loop over many rows (or columns) of data
I hope you will return to read these articles and I hope you will start your programming journey with me very soon! If you have any comments, please leave them below.
Until next time!
Link to the second article: