We had a motto at work; if you can say it in English, we can do it in code. I’ve not heard it in a while and I don’t know how true that is really, but there is a simple truth to it.
If you can say or write coherent sentences, you can code. At lot of a developers job is putting these sentence in a new language, it just happens that that language is a code syntax.
The equivalent of coding is learning a new language. That’s exactly what it is really.
This is another reason why I love Ruby. The basics are simple, the syntax is English.
For showing different colours on my old habits page, I use a simple condition:
English:
If value is greater than 0, then show green span, else show red span.
Ruby:
if value > 0
green_span
else
red_span
end
There are many ways to learn how to code, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. There are great articles, tutorials and general advice out there when learning to code.
I’ve personally been a big fan of Steph Smith’s approach recently. She has some great articles on her blog.
Almost everything can be picked up from Google and/or Stack Overflow. That’s basically a developers life.