Go to the profile of Rikin Katyal Rikin Katyal
2 days ago4 min read
Recommended by Aaron Taylor and 2 others
Finding out if programming is for you, the hard way.
A 6th grade boy fascinated by technology gets a link in his email. This link leads to a website he has never heard or seen before, but he still clicks on it. He ends up on a Udacity course titled Web Crawler — CS101.
That boy was me back in 2010 and that email was from my mother, who has a background in engineering and computers. She wanted me to start exploring the world of computer science by using this online video tutorial. Taking my mother’s advice, I started learning how to code Python from this website. Initially, I was very exited to do this course. Everyday after school, I’d quickly finish my homework so I move on to this “fun” stuff.
Now you may be surprised how eager a 12 year old was to program while his friends were outside playing. You see, I didn’t want to learn how to make this web crawler, I just wanted to make one or “download” one in a way. That was the reason I gave up on it 3 weeks into the course when things started getting more complex. I grew this fear of programming that it was not for me.
2 years later I had a spark that interested me to make an iOS application and I gave programming another shot. I looked into
…show more content…
But it all changed when my cousin visited me during the holidays. He was a 12th grade high school student who had developed a popular game with over 300,000 downloads on the Google Play Store. This was my inspiration to start learning Android development, so he set up Android Studio on my computer and taught me some XML. There I was again, having an app idea but no motivation to learn how to code. As you may have guessed, I found a video tutorial online by XDA Developers and I started on my journey but failed once again. I didn 't learn how to code, I just copy and pasted others code which can only get you so