For the love of coding!

I wrote my first lines of code at the age of 8. I must have been shot by Cupid's arrow at that moment for the love has survived 17 years and is still going strong, the longest lasting love that I have known!

This year I, along with a few colleagues, had the opportunity to mentor a bunch of 13 year old girls to develop an Android app using the App Inventor, a tool developed by MIT Labs that reduces writing code into some sort of a Lego game.

It's a far cry from QBasic (most kids in my school hated it). And it was good to see the girls quickly getting hooked on to dragging the blocks around and playing around with its features.

I'll admit that I'm somewhat a command line person. I love lines and lines of code and find all those colors and dragging around involved in App Inventor extremely annoying (and quite painful too thanks to Carpal tunnel syndrome). But if this is what it takes to get people hooked on to if-then-else these days, I guess I'll just have to endure.

Falling in love with coding shaped my life in probably more ways than I am aware of - from giving me such a strong ambition at the age of 8 to this irresistible urge to solve every problem. I drove my kid brother nuts the other day texting him to try this and that one after the other for he had mentioned that his cell phone's speaker had suddenly stopped working. This sort of behavior tends to annoy family and friends who do not share a similar love, and I find myself holding back sometimes just for their sake.

I was hoping to create some similar species out of the 5 girls we had at our mercy this year!! :D It was amazing watching them grow from 'this doesn't work, please do it' to 'I have tried this and this and this, but something is still wrong, could you show me how it's done?'.

Maybe everyone doesn't wanna be this way, and doesn't need to be this way. But then each of us have our own belief systems, and I guess this one's mine!