Have you ever used a cool app or visited an interesting website and thought, “How do they do that?” If your answer is yes, you’re definitely not alone. Many people are taking a crack at learning to code. 

It should come as no surprise that tech moguls, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are urging people to get into coding. President Obama has also joined the discussion from an employment standpoint. It makes sense that as the world becomes increasingly more dependent on technology, the need for computer programmers is expected to increase.

For those not interested in a career as a computer programmer or earning a computer science degree, coding can still be fun and extremely rewarding! For me, learning to code is fun because I like the way my mind works when trying to figure something out. I also like building things; piecing them together line by line. Of course, the fun doesn’t really start until the program doesn’t work…and the debugging process begins.

Learning anything new can be intimidating, but there are lots of online resources that make it fun. My personal favorite is Codecademy, which is an online learning environment that walks you through fun projects. There are a number of programming languages to choose from.

If you want to get started, here is a  short video for some inspiration…

“Learning how to program didn’t start off with wanting to learn all of computer science or trying to master this discipline or anything like that. It started off because I wanted to do this one simple thing — I wanted to make something that was fun for myself and my sisters.”

– Mark Zuckerberg