Learning to Love the Source
It was tenth grade, and I had just been grounded. Fortunately, I was still allowed to use my computer, which is rare for most teenagers. Back then, friends would view your MySpace page to see your “Top 8” friends, hear what your profile song was, and see whatever unique wallpaper you were sporting.
What’s a girl supposed to do when she’s grounded on a Friday night? I decided I would look up how to make my MySpace page unique. This is when I first learned how to code. (I use the word code very lightly, because the only HTML I knew at the time was <b>, <i>, <u>, and <br>. Pretty basic stuff, but I thought I was the smartest kid in my class.)
Fast forward to my sophomore year in college. I decided to take an elective class called Computer Applications for Business. Part of the class was creating a website for an imaginary business. This is where I learned the a foundation for coding: page breaks, different font sizes and text colors, and adding buttons and links to other pages on the website.
The class was fun, but I never thought it would come in handy in the future. At the time, I was majoring in communications, so I would have never guessed how important HTML would become in my professional career.
About a year ago, I was hired into the marketing department at SQE/TechWell with some HTML coding experience under my belt and very little knowledge of the software industry. I quickly realized how much more there was for me to learn about software development. On a daily basis, I update Drupal websites, spend hours in our marketing automation system fixing bad HTML code from the WYSIWYG, troubleshoot CSS issues, and deal with a long list list of other coding-based tasks.
I can now look at HTML and realize certain tags will cause problems and that not everything is solved by fixing one line of code. Scratching the surface of coding in my job has helped me truly appreciate all the intricacies that go into developing software.
I hope to meet some of you coding professionals at our upcoming software development conferences.
