Introducing Me: Green as Grass
Hello the internet, my name is Simon New and I have absolutely no coding experience! Ok, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration as I am pretty confident with manipulating excel workbooks using formulae, but aside from that, my coding experience is non-existent.
As of writing this post I am 29 and working as a Senior Development Scientist developing diagnostic products for the clinical sector. I currently have a black hole in my skill set as a scientist and that’s coding. Why Pythonghetti? Well, I have long spaghetti-like legs and am learning Python. Science aside, I can often be found pulling stupid faces with my bands.
So why am I here? A number of factors really. In the last 12 months, my work has become more focused on processing large volumes of data, which is taking a long time to do manually. I have recently been listening to a lot of podcasts which have covered automation via coding, data science, cyber security, ethical hacking and have become inspired. Coincidentally, I went on holiday and got chatting to a software engineer as well as meeting some Finish colleagues who all were competent coders. These experiences convinced me to at least try getting my feet wet with coding and if all goes well, expand upon my current skill set.
What follows will hopefully be a series of blog posts that describe the journey I am about to embark upon, the resources I have used, pitfalls I have encountered, real life projects I have set myself, projects I have become involved with, code that I have written and improvements suggested by the community. I will try to include useful information, however I am not aiming to produce a full set of tutorials. I’ll leave that to the experts for the time being.
I do not know where I will end up by taking these first steps, but I am excited to find out!
Footnote: Ok, confession time. I actually started my coding journey around September 2017. So in case you feel I have picked up a lot incredibly quickly, the next few blog posts will be me catching up with my experience and decisions to date. I will make a note when I am all caught up.