National Coding Week - Top 5 tips to get into Coding!

We’re proud of our amazing Engineers here at Jadu and we’re behind coding all the way. If it wasn’t for the coders in our team, our software wouldn’t exist and continue to improve.

We asked the team how they got into coding and what their top 5 tips would be to new aspiring coders! Oh yes, and if you want to join the Jadu Team as a Developer -check out our careers page.

Our top 5 tips to get into coding!

1. Make use of online tools and software
   There are heaps of online tools now to be able to self-teach yourself code. Take a look at some of our favourites; Scratch, GitHub, Codewars and coursera. 
    
2. Take a course
   If self-teaching doesn’t necessarily work for you, there are lots of courses out there with brilliant teachers who can show you the coding way. Check out your local colleges or universities for courses. 
    
3. Choose the coding language
   Coding is a little bit like learning a new foreign language, choose the code that you want to learn. Here are some to get you Googling; Java, HTML & CSS, Python & more!
    
4. Don’t be afraid to learn from others and ask for help.
   We find that sometimes, the best way to learn is by asking others who have experience and knowledge they can transfer to you. Can’t fix a bug and it’s driving you crazy? Ask an expert. You might just learn lots of tips and tricks to help develop your own career along the way. 
    
5. Give it a go!
   There’s nothing better than just trying to write new code. Use the tools above and just go for it. We bet you will come up with something that surprises you! 

Jadugars - tell us how you got into coding in one sentence?

My Dad taught me BASIC whilst I was at primary school and I just carried on from there. I  have literally zero idea how he ended up teaching me as I was too young to really remember, I think I probably just saw him coding, and wanted to know how to do it
(though he was writing in assembler and flashing chips back then).
David Paul, Jadu Senior Support Engineer

I was 10 years old, with a 90s programming language similar to that: check this one out: http://movetheturtle.com/ - Move the Turtle teaches children (ages 5+) the basics of programming.
Irini Koutaki, Jadu Engineer

Spending hours on a weekend manually copying code from Zap64 (Commodore 64 magazine) often to be greeted with “?SYNTAX ERROR L5098”.
James Jacobs, Jadu Senior Engineer

Recompiling WAD files for Doom, to add custom guns & monsters :)
James Manley, Jadu Senior Engineer

My dad taught me VB5 when I was in year 6 (so I was about 10)...
Dan Phillimore, Jadu Senior Engineer

I volunteered to do my school website and go to programming contests.
Paul Bele, Jadu Engineer

Schools now days tend to teach software development to some level I think? I learned by developing plugins for games and making websites.
Jack Bentley, Jadu Engineer

I didn’t really get much exposure to programming at school, we had BBC Micros in Primary, and Acorns in middle & high school, but it was late high school before I saw a Windows machine and even then there was only two in the entire school. I did some basic stuff on Spectrum and BBC, the turtle etc, but I really got into it when building a community website for an online music bulletin board, that was my gateway into databases and scripting. I remember being completely confused by ASP and getting on much better with PHP.
Paul Stanton, Jadu Senior Engineer

I’ve always liked computers in general but didn’t write a line of code until I was 18 at uni. I didn’t write a website HTML/JS until I was 20… and I didn’t write a line of PHP until I was 25 at Jadu… should I be ashamed of myself? :D
Miguel Rosales, Jadu Engineer

Good luck! 
The Jadu Engineering Team