For many of us, coding is not just a hobby or a profession, it's a passion. But how do you share that passion with the people in your lives who may not understand or have the same interests? Here are a few ideas for ways to introduce coding to your friends and family:
- Create something useful - like a website for a friend’s business, perhaps.
- Share interesting tech news - this is a great way to spark a conversation and get others interested in what you do.
- Teach them basic coding concepts - HTML and CSS are accessible, and teaching your friends and family some basic concepts could be a fun way to spend time together…and gain a new skill!
- Participate in coding events - get your loved ones to tag along and cheer you on! They get to see firsthand what it's like to be a coder and meet other people who share your passion.
How do you share your love for coding with your friends and family?
Top comments (10)
Its always great to integrate family not just to code, but in general for this new era of amazing technology, I have some list to share
Learning to code can be a fun and rewarding experience for everyone, regardless of age or experience level. Spreading the coding love and empower our family can be accomplish , any more ideas?
attitude is everything
Recently got my sister into programming for her career in anthropology
She was interning at a lab and had to manually download something like 1,500 files from a website and compile information about the downloads into a CSV. Her advisor had her doing this all by hand and it was going to take her 30-40 hours of extremely tedious, unpaid labor over the course of a few weeks so she asked if I could help her write a program that would do the work for her. A couple short hours later we had all the files scraped, processed, and ready to go 😎
Since then I've been teaching her R and she's been getting super excited about all the possibilities opening up for her, we're going to start collaborating on open source data dashboards that are anthropology related and I could see her even getting into a bit of anthro-adjacent data science
This was a fun challenge as well:
had a friend working at a physics lab and she had a similar manual data processing task where she had to use a custom proprietary GUI to convert specific equipment's data from one format to another - essentially pressing the same few buttons, selecting a file, and pressing some more buttons (which would've been fine except there were thousands of files)
She asked if I could automate it and I was like sure why not, only challenge was I was 300 miles (483 km) away and we couldn't screenshare, had to basically write a desktop automation without being able to see or test on the machine lol ended up working very smoothly though and she became interesting in coding after that (and I'm p sure the lab continued to use my program even after she left lol)
Most people I know are just not really that tech savvy, my dad actually send the same e-mail 6 times yesterday, because my brother installed Outlook on the family laptop without saying a thing.
So the send e-mail inbox didn't synchronize when right click sending an attachment with the other program 😒
But I always go to deep into the details for people to understand. So that's my tip, try go gauge what people do and don't understand and talk further on such a level. Else they get A: Bored or B: Overwhelmed with info.
I try to code all the private joke wich sounds like "Imagine if there a website for ..."
I show my love for coding when I bug them with it orwith try to teach them terminology.
If you're not a web person, another cool alternative to "make a website for your friend" is to make simple tools to make someone's life easier. My roommate does a job that involves finding typos in Google Sheets, and there wasn't any Sheets extension yet that can spellcheck the entire spreadsheet en masse, so I wrote one for her. Did a hacky job, but she still keeps thanking me for how much easier it makes her work! A great small example could be writing a little script that someone can use to automate a task they do a lot.
I notify my friends about programming events. For example, hacktoberfest. We can discuss technical news with the family
My family hate me and think so that i am an unusable