We get questions all the time about how we started doing all this. Where did we learn to code? How on earth does any of that make sense? Some people are interested in learning for themselves. It’s easy to get started, especially in this day and age. Back when we started you had to read books and follow tedious program outlines and procedures. It took a long time and things moved slowly. Now there are thousands of tutorials available at places like Youtube and there are hundreds of websites dedicated to teaching you how to code.

It’s really not all that difficult. Once you learn how the language operates, the rest just falls into place. Large systems are simply a group of smaller systems – complex is just a whole bunch of simple – if that makes sense.

Learning to code is frustrating at first but very rewarding. Look to invest several years before you can call yourself a “master”  but most people pick it up after their first year or so and are comfortable in most situations. The bigger question is: what language do you want to code in?

There are quite a few.

We prefer PHP – it’s robust, popular and here for the long haul.

Perl and Python fun and a little different.

Ruby and Ruby on Rails is powerful and intuitive.

If you’re looking to code iphone and Android apps then you’ll need a Java background for Android and XCode for iphone (based on something called objective-c)

Of course websites are coded in HTML and CSS, but those aren’t really programming languages.

There’s a lot more out there so find what works for you and just jump in. It will be confusing at first but being self taught is easier than you think.