I Coded My First Program

I’ll delve into more detail in the future, but I’m very happy to say that today I completed a goal I’ve had for a long time: writing a program using code.

That may seem funny to say because I run a code school, but running a code school and writing code are two very different things (and you don’t have to be excellent at both unless you’re a one-person school). As far as writing code goes, I know enough HMTL and CSS to be dangerous, but I’ve lingered on the edge of building actual programs for some time.

I’m on a week-long business trip to Houston, which means lots of quiet work time in a hotel room¹.

I don’t really enjoy TV, so at the end of long days I tend to work on side projects so that my mind is occupied, but not under pressure. Many times that involves writing, but I’ve produced a mountain of copy on this trip so I haven’t quite been in author-mode after hours.

I decided to dust off a few JavaScript tutorials I’d started a while back and was instantly sucked back into the exhilarating and frustrating problem-solving vortex of programming.

After a few hours of tutorials and then tinkering on my own in a text editor, I’d produced a working program. It’s a game called “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Rope.” More on that later.

For now, I’m just happy to have built something that works, no matter how messy it is. Here’s a snippet of the code:

https://gist.github.com/ericdodds/129b6691930d7691cd51.js

1. I like working in hotel rooms. More on that here.