Hi, I'm Sean and I'm an oldie coder..... a Codie! (Please don't mention order 66!)
I am really into Python and am busy moving through intermediate levels of coding at the momment.
I am really enjoying experimenting with different web presentation libraries at the moment, my current fave is Streamlit, though I can see its limits. Perhaps you could let me know what you think of other ones?
My awakening to the potential of computers to enrich the world, like most born in the early 70’s, came watching Star Wars for the first time. We saw droids that could walk, talk, think and support the people around them. Princesses were recording messages, rebels used digitally presented plans to destroy the Death Star, travelers in space ships played holographic games while navigating hyperspace. Mind expanded!
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I first sat down in front of a real computer, it was about as far away from R2D2 as you could get! I was ill one day and off school and my Dad took me to his work (at the University of Cambridge) and showed me a huge terminal that had just been installed in his offices to help his team load, process and publish datasets on national exams in the UK. He showed me how to do some programming in Assembly. I then spent the rest of the day some really basic coding to build a calculator. It took me all day to do something that would take 10 minutes today, but the process of building the code fascinated me and woke up the coder within!
At Christmas 1983 I opened up an Acorn Electron and my coding career started with BBC BASIC. Dad said he wouldn’t buy us any games (other than Chess!) to start with, I would need to learn how to code first.
I dived into the programming books that made up our stocking presents and quickly any time not spent at school, eating, sleeping or playing football was spent building my coding skills. Thankfully it wasn’t long before magazines started to publish code listings for games which you could type in and improve yourself. Birthday and holiday presents were games like Elite, Repton and Beach Head. I wrote rudimentary graphing software along with little programs that helped with homework. My greatest project was a road network simulator where you could alter the volumes and pattern of cars on the roads and then see which combinations of traffic light system would make the cars flow best!
At 17, my Sixth Form College Computing course started on Acorn’s first RISC (the fore runner of the ARM chips) computer, the Archimedes, introduced me to C++. My first Object Orientated programming environment was something of a challenge for me and the realisation that beer, girls and cars were now in my world took me away from coding.
I started work as a sales person at 19, selling accounting systems to start off with, then 8 years in the Apple reseller world and subsequently the main part of my career as a sales person, marketeer and ultimately a leader of GovTech software companies. A career alongside a life as a father and husband put coding on the bottom of the list of things I could invest time in, though I have built several websites over the years using products like WordPress and pure HTML coding in the earlier days of the internet.
At 50 I started to realise that my brain was not getting the training it needed to stay as sharp as I wanted it to be to support my work and keep up with a group of 5 children whose academic endeavors waere already past my own. I returned to coding, found Python and Raspberry Pi computing and once again any spare time I had was spent learning the basics, practicing more advanced skills and eventually building my own projects. There are loads of really great books and learning resources, but I did notice that there was a lack of support for newer programmers who sometimes don’t know exactly how to ask the questions right, or interpret the helpful answers from very experienced coders. I also began to realise that it might be possible to forge a post-corporate career as a coder. Positive Python was born.
Coding now provides me with a training environment for my brain, a hobby for me to pursue ideas and projects that I have been dreaming about for years and I hope a set of skills which will allow me to contribute positively into my retirement years.