Caffeine Fuelled Geeks

So getting up early on a Thursday morning to come in before work, fuel up on strong coffee and push code is not something you associate with the lives of most Technical Recruiters. But I wanted to get through to the end of the HTML/CSS module on Codecademy...

I know there was a lot of debate recently about 2014 as the 'Year of Code' and whether that was a good thing or not. Google obviously think it is... As a technical recruiter the skills shortage in the UK market is pretty evident, so it would make sense to try and release the pressure by getting more young people coding. And it probably wouldn't stick with most people - would most people's stories become those of the self-professed 'caffeine-fuelled geek' whose CVs I come across rarely and excitedly? Maybe a few - but what a fantastic gift to give those few.

But I reckon for most people, who will use tools created by developers for a large part of every day of their lives, blissfully ignorant of how the puzzle fits together, it will help to demystify an ever more complex technical world. And if Prince Andrew is putting together a 15 minute website, then god knows Tech Recs have no excuse to remain ignorant!

This isn't my first brush with coding, actually; I did a little bit of C++ at University under the guidance of my engineer friends, so I knew what code looked like on a page. I had forgotten the satisfaction, though, that you feel when what you've written works! I think I've always written creatively or opinionatedly as a way of structuring my thoughts and making sense of them, and actually there's a very similar feeling of satisfaction that I got out of a few really (like, really) simple lines of HTML. Painfully basic initial observations and feelings: I like that you open and close things, I like that logic, it's like clauses in grammar! It reminded me of learning human languages. I wonder why the command words you use in coding are English? Are all programming languages like that?

I'm kind of excited to reach the point where I get really stuck with something - that's when you actually start learning... I doubt I'm far off that point!