Should you learn to code?

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 00:33:21 +0000

If you’re in marketing or public relations, do you need to code and program software?

The answer is no. Yet, in this day and age it is best if you do know these things. I am not saying you should know how to design a full featured software or build a website from scratch (but if you can I am very happy to meet you and please leave a comment below so I can say hi!).

Knowing how the web works can help you find new opportunities to integrate content and social media, to think up new and exciting strategies for clients or your own brand. It can even be a way for you to save valuable time and resources in order to get an interesting project off the ground or deploy a decent campaign for your small business.

This is not about knowing how to setup IFTTT or Buffer. It’s about being able to build your own site, fix occasional glitches on a blog’s html (even if just in the article) or figure out ways to get the computer to do the work for you.

For example, when I teach about social media and crisis communication I always mention how being able to start a blog at a moment’s notice can be a great asset. Do you want to depend on your development team for that on a saturday night when the client is on the other end of the line?

I know a bit about programming and it is useful every day. It can be about building a webpage or code a newsletter. It can also be something like building a small script to collect data for me and save it as an excel spreadsheet. Skills that I picked up mostly from reading Lifehacker and specially the articles written by Gina Trapani.

Knowing about new technology and open source software helps me suggest campaigns or alternative routes. There are a few examples of this at The Labs.

Stepping up a level

What I don’t know very well is how to design a piece of software. Sure, I have made things that work. What I want to know now is how to plan features and how those features should work together, how to do something from scratch if I have to. This means taking a few steps back and learning the basics.

I asked Bruno Abrantes and he suggested a few online courses and tools:

Coursera, Computer Science 101
Coursera, Algorithms: Design and Analysis
HardvardX, Introduction to Computer Science
Craftsmanship – Mars Rover Kata to better understand Test Driven Development
https://exercism.io/ for practice and community mentorship

Recommended by João Neves:

Think Python – How to think like a computer scientist

If you want something fun and easy to try out, I suggest Codecadamy. There is also a nice introduction to Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework called Rails for Zombies that is worth checking out.

A small update

João Mamede pointed out to me this article at Coding Horror – Please don’t learn to code. Feels too extremist but I empathise and agree with some of his arguments. Especially:

Please don’t advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …

Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.

Communicate effectively with other human beings.

Exporting Things.app tasks to Todo.txt format

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 10:15:32 +0000

Warning, there is some serious geek talk coming up.

Long story short I have been using Things as my task management for a long time. What is bad about these tools is that they rarely allow you to export or save your tasks into a universal format that can be read by any app.

Fortunately, Gina Trapani came up with Todo.txt calling it a Future-proof task tracking in a file you control.

Since it works with a simple text file you can use it together with Dropbox and sync it across devices.

I think you can see where I am getting at…

If Todo.txt is so simple and useful it makes perfect sense to use it as the universal format to save/export/import tasks. To make this perfect, there are a few task management tools that support the todo.txt syntax.

So I dove into the Things.app applescript documentation and after a while came up with a little script that you can use to export your tasks and break free so you can try out other task management solutions or even come up with your own.

Everything is available for free in my github account, I hope you find it useful.

Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Should you learn to code?

Stepping up a level

A small update

Exporting Things.app tasks to Todo.txt format