“Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhibit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
~Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway
This was true and always will be, but what is becoming increasingly important is the ability to code. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn to code so that I can execute some of the crazy ideas in my head instead of relying on someone else. Thankfully The Fetch gave me the opportunity to attend an intensive week long front end web development course with the equally lovely people at Steer, to learn some of the skills to pay the bills.
My bags packed and an early night sleep I was raring to go on Monday morning. Which happened to be the day after Andy Murray effectively earned himself a knighthood and the start of London’s heatwave, so thank God, Steer’s Farringdon office had air conditioning. We were greeted by the our teachers for the week Rik and Callum, the cat loving Jedi knight and his young ex-rock star Padawan, and then introduced to the rest of the class, an eclectic bunch, mainly consisting of designers but there were also people in private equity, publishing, teaching, those ad types.
The course was excellently put together, we started off with a simple one page CV site, just to get the basics of HTML then moved to a great little photo blog to learn about floats and layout. After which we moved to TeaTime, on which we learnt responsive design for mobiles and tablets. By the end of the week we got to jQuery, that’s when things started to get a little more difficult, but especially rewarding, as we built some really cool expensive looking websites.
Rik is clearly supremely skilled developer, his Jedi skills on demonstration at lunch one day when he was showing us some websites and then decided to copy one which he duly knocked out in approximately seven minutes straight from scratch.
The sequence of sites we built gave us the skills to build real websites and not just learn the syntax of HTML and JavaScript, so all very practical knowledge. They’ve almost nailed the pace, we get a lot packed in whilst still having the support of the teachers so that no one gets left behind. Oh and they have excellent food and drinks to keep us nourished throughout – I love hummus bros now.
Since the course I’ve manage to land a commission to build a site for a little pharma company in India, so it’s already paying dividends (Rik you’ll see me at your free Thursday drop in help sessions a lot!) and hopefully once I get a bit more experience I’ll be enrolling onto the back end course.
Thanks all of you guys for the opportunity, I’ll won’t forget you guys when I’m sitting in my ivory tower after selling my company for 100 gazillion pounds.
So yes, it does look like you can learn to code in one week. For a listing of other great offline workshops and future Steer sessions, check out The Fetch in your city. Keep a look out for future scholarships so we can send you along.
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About our contributor // Kumar Kolar was the recipient of a Steer scholarship after he submitted a brilliant application for our competition in London. He also visited India recently and blessed a Fetch-coloured tennis ball to bring us prosperity – what more could we ask for! Pic here. Views are his own and not led by Steer!
Image credit: Kumar and Rik during a code session
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