How to Code
Coding resources; a huge source for reading free science research; AI actually isn't art.
I have a list of skills I keep meaning to learn. Coding is there like a lazy warning light. It, along with the other skills, keep blinking — a steady drum of reminders: learn this to stay relevant. Learn this to diversify. Learn this to justify. Stop puttering, and learn.
This line of thinking is irrational, harmful even. Perhaps it emerges out of capitalism engine that gears our skills into a commodification — that tries to steam press a person into a digital brand.
Or, related, it’s an existential anxiety that I need push towards a “should” rather than a “want” of genuine desire to learn or play.
Sometimes, often times, we learn a skill so we can do a job, earn money, but perhaps learning a skill should come from somewhere else: a natural instinct. Something you need, or truly want. Something that you want to be absorbed in doing for the sake of absorption, not the achievements that may come with it. Not something that you think you should learn so you’re more relevant.
After spending a lot of time thinking about learning to code, more than actually learning how to do it, I’ve began to shift my original intent: What problem can coding solve for me, or what fun can I have?
I want to build things with code. Use it to organize useful data. I’d love to build a website, or an app. Our world is built on code, more and more each month. Software eats the world, says the billionaires who built our daily lives, swirled in the tech we use everyday. This is true. Learning to code would be a form of resistance — learning to make the jaws, rather than be eaten by the concentrated power of mega companies that I encounter (and use) everyday.
This skill though, in recent years has lost it’s rocket ship quality — it’s not a no brainer for a good, safe job like it was when I went to school. For coding, perhaps more than writers, has been served with a certain amount of anxiety because of AI. With that said, in many cases, AI helps coders get better and learn. It can give access to those who have never coded before.
However, like writing, there’s a real slip in letting the machine do all the decision-making, and leaders should keep that in mind, too. Here’s a thoughtful personal history with coding from the New Yorker. It hints at the past and shifting landscape of the craft.
Here are some resources for how to code:
To get familiar with coding: What is Code from Bloomberg. Written in 2015, but still a wonderful and poetic historical grounding into this skill and verb that has created our world. The writer, Paul Ford is a computer programer himself, and a big-hearted voice.
A free digital book: AUTOMATE THE BORING STUFF WITH PYTHON, 2ND EDITION by Al Sweigart. If I were to actually start learning, I’d start here. I love this bit from his intro:
…programming is much easier to learn today than it was in the 1990s. Today, there are more books, better search engines, and many more online question-and-answer websites. On top of that, the programming languages themselves are far more user-friendly. For these reasons, everything I learned about programming in the years between grade school and high school graduation could be learned today in about a dozen weekends. My head start wasn’t really much of a head start.
It’s important to have a “growth mindset” about programming—in other words, understand that people develop programming skills through practice. They aren’t just born as programmers, and being unskilled at programming now is not an indication that you can never become an expert
I’m also going to borrow Sweigart’s bullet points for what coding can do for you:
Moving and renaming thousands of files and sorting them into folders
Filling out online forms—no typing required
Downloading files or copying text from a website whenever it updates
Having your computer text you custom notifications
Updating or formatting Excel spreadsheets
Checking your email and sending out prewritten responses
Basically coding can help you tell computers to do tasks for you.
Free Harvard courses. See intro to computer science. Also see this crash course on Python, HERE.
Here’s a good list for coding organizations focused on women. Posted on Medium, see HERE.
Using hacking skills for activism: Micah Lee has a book called Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data that I keep on meaning to crack open, too. I don’t have a specific use case, but this may be a way to find a problem to put coding skills into action.
Here’s a grab bag of video teaching resources from this Reddit link:
traversy media - traversy media
programming with mosh - programming with mosh
freecodecamp - freecodecamp
web Dev simplified - web dev simplified
scrimba.com - scrimba It's a website log of free and premium tutorials.
MDN Web Docs - MDN Web Docs
Javascript.info - JavaScript.info
Okay, that’s what I have. Those are all my current doorways to coding if I were to start. Share any others in comments or in an email.
Some good stuff:
Ted Chiang bringing truth and an important perspective when it comes to AI and art. Art is a choice, Chiang argues, and a flow of intention from the human being doing the making. He seems to be baffled that artists — writers, creators, painters, illustrators, musicians, etc — would use AI to begin with. The work that a chatbot looks to outsource actually takes away the skill of thinking, of shaping thoughts and strengthening an awareness. The boring apocalypse of sending an AI summary to someone who responds to that summary with an AI response may be the future — pulverizing the meaning of a communication. Chiang’s words remind me that when meaning — intention — is behind the word or brushstroke, it means something. Own your communication — we must make time to care for the communication.
“ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.”
and
As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way
‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine. An excellent piece from 404Media that explores one organization’s attempt to make homemade versions of expensive medicine.
Access to millions of research papers for free. As its website states, Sci-hub, “is the most controversial project in modern science. The goal of Sci-Hub is to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge.” I am finding this really useful if you lack university access to research-based information. It’s got it all from medical, science, to humanities. This is knowledge and information that usually requires you to work for an institution, be a student, or pay lots of money to access. I view this as a good thing. Check it out.
Should you turn on the “open to work” banner on LinkedIn? Great, in-depth writing on this question from Aki Ito from Business Insider.
A memoir with beautiful connections. Sabrina Imbler’s memoir and love letter to marine life, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures glitters in its boldness and metaphoric tissue. We often skip through life using a phrase and connection, and filling in the blank, “My life is like…” Sabrina cranks up the depth of what we can compare life to while also parachuting a wider breadth of understanding about living on earth, living among humans. They borrow science writing and research on the sand striker, immortal jellyfish, salps, whales, and more, to bring readers on a tour of the sea and their life — showing us a glimmering set of connections. We see the world more when we connect. As they state in this interview: “…this book is the idea of anthropomorphism and our human instinct to compare ourselves to animals. I definitely do that a lot in the book, because I think it’s natural. I think it is weird to sort of deny the instinctual connections that you have with something that reminds you of yourself.” Lots of reasons to pick this one up. Also see their work at Defector.
AI troubles with the National Novel organization: “The organization that runs National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) declared condemnation of AI “classist and ableist,” and participants in its annual writing challenge are pissed.” See more on this story from 404Media.
A prompt for you, not the bot: Either make it up, or use a true example: Write a story that has a computer playing a central role. It’s not just a part of the environment, but rather the computer is a main part of the story. It can be a villain, a main character, or it can contain a secret, be a tool, or something sacred. Go for it.
More soon, Tucker