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My Journey to Coding
Being lucky enough to have early computers in the house while growing up, as the games became more sophisticated, my early interest in basic programming waned.
Determined to have my own business, I quickly realised how useful coding would be in making prototype products and automating laborious administrative tasks. My interest was rekindled.
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ZX81
I remember a very basic asteroid game and my first infinite loop program.
Texas Instruments TI-99/4A
Pac-Man, or its equivalent.
Spectrum 48+
The sound of games loading, remembered forever.
The Barren Years
Facetious, but all of the time not spent on coding or designing systems that would eventually need to be coded. Without a doubt I enjoyed this time too.
Java, with Eclipse and a very dry reference ‘bible’.
I purchased a copy, set up Eclipse and printed a diamond. Interesting, but not a good choice for a beginner. I didn’t get close to knowing what an object was.
Learn Python the Hard Way.
Really enjoyed this book, and almost got to grips with OOP by the end of it. I have not looked at Python since, but am sure it would come back to me quickly.
madebyfun.com
Thinking big, use cases written.
Then the idea of a pick-up pack and despatch service came to me in November 2017. I had a full system sketched out by March 2018. With detailed use cases for most parts shown here. I was really enthusiastic about this process, there were so many moving parts in my head and I had to get them down somehow. The use case template I researched and the description of the process used for writing them made perfect sense to me.
Research
Then I had to find out if there was a market for my proposed services. I wrote a questionnaire and carried out interviews with retailers. The services are shown in the attached pdfs. Eventually the concept grew to include a centralised Antwerp website, with top items from each participating store, and the recycling/repurposing of retailer delivery boxes and packaging materials.
Decision point - pivot to the Made By Fun pilot.
The findings in the attached report were enough to convince me to go ahead with a limited pilot. I would keep expenses down to a minimum and review the situation at the end of the first year. In retrospect, I should have completed control interviews where the good causes were not mentioned, and asked respondents to value the proposed services in real money.
The site is no longer active, it was an info site that clearly defined the values of Made By Fun completed in time for the retailer interviews. The main content can be seen here:
Pick Up System MVP Version 1 packlove.life
These are the instructions for the initial system. Retailers logged in and filled out a form every day they had orders to be picked up. This was unpopular and quickly replaced.
Pick Up System MVP Version 2
The second Minimum Viable Product, was more sophisticated being directly linked to the customers web-shop. The orders were automatically displayed for pick-up in a shared Slack channel. The full pickup-pack-despatch system used Slack, Google Cloud Print, Coda, Airtable and Google Sheets all pulled together with Integromat (now Make).
Decision Point - End of Pilot Dec 2019.
I ended the pilot, the killer was my failure to get the good causes I’d approached on board. Without them it was difficult to maintain momentum. There was a service, but whether it was valued enough to ever become economically viable was doubtful. As a non-profit, a solution for inner city recyclable waste, and a way of bringing small retailers together as they faced massive competition from the online behemoths.. It could have been interesting.
Java Course Feb → October 2021
My CV at the time mentioned a basic knowledge of Python. I feel so lucky that this was noticed by the VDAB. I was offered the opportunity to apply for a JAVA enterprise course, I jumped at the chance and was lucky enough to get in. Since then I have been busy improving my skills and general IT knowledge.
Since learning to code
Back to: Following “graduating” successfully from the Java Enterprise course I didn’t stop programming every day. I continued with a more than five day a week commitment to learning more whilst looking for work. It was fairly easy to keep up the habit that I’d formed during the course, and my motivation is the subject. Below is a link to a pdf showing all of my main GitHub activity since finishing the course. The gaps? October 2021 → February 2022 I was busy elsewhere with a MEAN stack project, Vaadin sandbox and massive JS course. I have been busy learning as much as I can about Cyber-Security since August 2022.
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