Why you should learn to code
Transcriber: Martina Abrami
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
In 2014, I was living
in São Paulo, Brazil.
The country was obsessed
with the coming World Cup,
and I was too.
I absolutely had to get to
as many games as possible,
but there was a problem.
The only way to get tickets
was this horrible website
that would release them at random times
throughout the day.
I was working as a teacher at the time,
and when somebody at work
would see tickets pop up,
they’d run around the hallways
telling all the other teachers
and we’d spend time of our lessons
abandon our students
and try to buy tickets.
I got really frustrated with this process.
Nobody wants to spend their day
refreshing web pages,
neglecting children,
or worst of all, miss a release
because they were too slow.
But by using a little trick,
the right click “inspect”
that’s available on every browser,
I was able to see a straightforward list
of how many tickets were available.
And this was an eye opening moment for me
because it showed me that
the information I wanted was right there
and though I didn’t have the tools yet
to make it myself,
I knew what I needed.
An automated program
that would check that site
and let me know when there were tickets.
So I started coding.
I learned just enough to know
what to look for on Google,
where I found snippets
that other people had already written,
which I copy-pasted and pieced together
in a way that worked for me.
I got stuck for a bit on this one part,
but I learned that the Internet
is full of forums
of people willing to help you
if you ask for it,
like I did on Stack Overflow.
After some help I got there,
it all clicked for me.
I put my program on a little PC
and set it to run
every minute of every day,
just to be sure I didn’t miss
another release.
Because of my program, I ended up going
to nine different World Cup games.
But most importantly,
I learned that the vast amount
of information on the Internet
can be put to use in a way
that’s helpful to me.
This recognition that I could create
my own solution spurred me on.
And with each bit I learned,
I started noticing things in my life
that I was doing on the computer
and that were repetitive.
I started getting really frustrated
with things that were repetitive, and so
I looked for every opportunity I could
to automate it.
One of those repetitive tasks
was figuring out
where to drink beer with my friends.
We used to spend a lot of time
figuring out which beer bars to go to.
So I made a program that grabbed
the list of beers from the sites,
found the rating,
and then put it all together in one place
where we could have a quick overview.
Of course, I had visions
of engatados.com.br
being a revenue generating website
to be the toast
of the São Paulo beer scene.
But no one came.
I used it a lot.
A couple of friends used it, too,
but it didn’t matter
because that improved my quality of life
by automating tasks
and spending less time on the computer
and more time with my friends.
Since then I’ve automated
a lot of other things:
finding cheap train tickets,
finding the best wine deals
at my supermarket,
the best restaurants to go to.
I’ve even use it to plan trips
to wine regions in Spain and Italy.
You may have noticed a theme
with these topics I work with.
It’s mostly food, drink and travel.
Those are things
that I’m generally interested in.
But most importantly, it was really
useful for me to automate them.
I’m sure you have things
like this in your life, too.
Finding airplane tickets,
checking if your favorite
pair of shoes is on sale,
finding a COVID vaccine date.
This is the key to finding
your first task to automate.
it should be annoying for you to do,
but it has to be something
that you find interesting and useful.
But something strange happened
as I started writing all this code.
It became something I do for fun,
for relaxation, or if I was bored.
It became a creative outlet for me.
And at one point, when
I was searching for a new job,
it became for me a way for me
to blow off the stress of that.
I decided to create a Twitter bot
that was for education jargon
or edu babble
just to see how many
followers it could get.
It ended up getting around 14.000 of them
and it was getting retweet
of the nonsense that it posted
and private messages asking
for teaching advice.
And it did relieve stress for me
because it was funny and it was fun.
It certainly wasn’t something
I thought I’d experience
when I started writing code.
So keep an eye out
for your World Cup problem
that gets you started
automating and coding.
And I hope that, like me,
you end up enjoying it
for the enriching creative act it can be.
Thank you.