Watch Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi describe the way they first learnt how to code and how important coding is for today's world and will be for tomorrow's world.
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Self-study activity:
No task today. Simply enjoy the sheer pleasure of watching and listening to some of the most outstanding pioneers of today's world and listen to their advice.
You can find the transcript below. Remember you can double click on any word you don't understand to get its definition.
I was 13 when I first got access to a computer.
My parents bought me a Macintosh in 1984 when I was eight years old.
I was in the sixth grade.
I learnt to code in college.
Freshman year, first semester, intro to computer science.
I wrote a program to play tick-tack-toe.
I think it was pretty humble beginnings, I think the first program I wrote asked things like what’s your favorite color, or how old are you?
I first learnt how to make a green circle, and a red square appear on the screen.
The first time I actually had something come up and say, hello world, and it – I made a computer do that, it was just astonishing.
Learning how to program didn’t start off as wanting to learn all of computer science or trying to master this discipline or anything like that. It just started off because I wanted to do this one simple thing, I wanted to make something that was fun for myself and my sisters. And I wrote this little program and then basically just added a little bit to it. And then, when I needed to learn something new, I looked it up, either in a book or in the internet, and then added a little bit to it.
It’s really not unlike kind of playing an instrument or something or playing a sport. It starts out being very intimidating, but you kind of get the hang of it over time.
Coding is something that can be learned, and I know it can be intimidating, a lot of things are intimidating, but you know what isn’t?
A lot of the coding that people do is actually fairly simple. It’s more about the process of breaking down problems than you know sort of coming up with complicated algorithms as people traditionally think about it.
You don’t have to be a genius to know how to code, you need to be determined.
Addition, subtraction, that’s about it.
Should probably know your multiplication tables.
You don’t have to be a genius to code, do you have to be a genius to read?
Even if you want to become a race car driver or play baseball or you know build a house, all of these things have been turned upside down by software.
But it is this, you know computers are everywhere. Do you want to work in agriculture? Do you want to work in entertainment? Do you want to work in manufacturing, you know it’s just all over it.
Here we are 2013. We all depend on technology to communicate, to bank, information, and none of us know how to read and write code.
When I was in school, I was in this afterschool group called the Wizkids and when people found out, they laughed at me, you know all these things and I am like, man, I don’t care, I think it’s cool and you know I am learning a lot, and some of my friends have jobs.
Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is just that there aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.
To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible.
We have a fantastic chef.
Free food.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Free laundry.
Snacks.
Even places to play and videogames and scooters, there is all these kind of interesting things, around the office, places where people can play or relax or go to think or play music or be creative.
Whether you are trying to make a lot of money, or whether you just want to change the world, computer programming is an incredibly empowering skill to learn.
I think if someone had told me that software is really about humanity, that it’s really about helping people by using computer technology, it would have changed my outlook a lot earlier.
To be able to actually come up with an idea and then see it in your hands and then be able to press a button and have it be in millions of people’s hands, I mean, I think we are the first generation of the world that’s really ever had that kind of experience.
Just to think that, I mean, you can start something in your college dorm room and you can have a set of people who haven’t built a big company before, come together and build something that a billion people use, is part of their daily lives, it’s just crazy to think about it, right? It’s really humbling and that’s amazing.
The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You know you are going to look you have magic powers compared to everybody else.
I think it’s amazing, I think it’s the closest thing we have to superpower.
Great coders are today’s rockstars. That’s it.
