As you may have heard, I am part of three teams / companies that are creating mobile applications. Oh, I am not a techie person, and my I don’t have any IT experience, except blogging (if you even consider basic HTML commands as valid IT experience). What I know though is that technology is and will continue to change industries and lives of people. I believe in that and that is the reason why I want to be part of this industry — to make disruptive changes.
For one of the tech companies that I am involved in, from the time we started, we didn’t have any tech partner. It has been a source of lots of problems. The major concern is that we have been delayed with our launch because of this, but fortunately, we found a new partner / provider that can help us develop an upgraded version of the app.
Having this problem has made me and my friend (also with a marketing background) think about learning programming and coding. We are both ladies, who have no experience in programming (oh except the time in HS where we had basic programming and we would copy our classmate’s work), and the only reason why we want to learn how to code is to know more about it. We know that we can’t be experts and it may even take time before we can develop our own application, but having the knowledge of how it’s done can help us explain better what we want to our partners and providers.
Right now, I’m learning Python, since this is what my husband (who by the way is an excellent programmer) said I should start with.
I’m 39% done, but I must say that this has made me realize a lot of things. It made me think of what stops us from learning new things. One of the things that I realized is that it takes a certain passion and patience to continue on and to learn. There are so many distractions and it takes someone with a certain level of persistence to finish courses and even to finish a chosen book.
A tip that I have gotten from this experience is find that single reason why you want to learn. It may be to improve your business, to improve your career, to impress others, to impress a loved one — any thing. This will be enough motivation for you to keep on learning. My personal motivation is because a lot of the things that I am doing now requires at least a basic understanding of coding or programming. This is why I am being a patient student and I’m trying to learn everything I can.
What will motivate you to learn? Find that motivation and embrace learning!
