Chapter 2 - Hello World

Greeting All,

As we continue on this journey, I want all of you to know that when chemical reactions are taking place, there is a bit of energy that is needed to start it. They are known as activation energy. This can be defined as the initial amount of energy that is required by particles to start giving in successful collisions.

In simpler terms: Picture a toy car that is not moving or at rest. To make it moving, we need to push it a bit. The force we apply while we push is the activation energy. The activation energy I used was the movie that pushed me to start coding.

I can vaguely remember a bright Thursday Afternoon while we were all in lockdown, I fired up my computer and went on the youtube search bar to type in: Coding for beginners. The eighth video that popped us was by Namanh Kapur and was titled “How I Would Learn To Code (If I Could Start Over)” I watched the 13 minute and 42 second video and came to a conclusion that coding is a fulfilling journey that may not always be easy, but it changes one's mindset and approach to life.

Then I typed in “How to code” and I was introduced to many languages. I thought that coding was the way it was shown in movies, and that we type in 0s and 1s. I thought that Python was a snake and that Java was a coffee shop.

Then I opened up the youtube video by freecodecamp.org that was about learning python in under 4 hours. That was it. That was my activation energy. The push I needed to get my journey started.

I installed pycharm and python and Hello World! it was. Hello World is every programmer’s first word. When I pressed run, the joy that I experienced was on a different level. I had typed one line of code in python and paused the video immediately. I wanted to make google. I mean how hard could it be. I opened up another video on how to make google and there I was…

I was so lost it was like dora the explorer when the ocean is behind her and she asked the screen “Can you tell me where the ocean is? Say Ocean” That was how I felt. It was as if the person in the video was talking about random things. So I went back to the freecodecamp video and continued learning from there. I finished the video and had not learnt a lot. Although I did know the basics like loops and conditionals statements, variables, functions and classes. I then started doing projects with the little knowledge I had. I started making calculators and order systems. I started making command line quiz apps and other things like that.

That was arguably the best thing I could have done. I think that learning through projects is the best thing that someone can do. It allows for hands on experience, allows you to apply concepts and apply your problem solving skills.