The need to learn coding!

I have been working as a food engineer for technology companies pretty much all of my professional life. As a student at food engineering school I actually started, really badly I admit, to write software programs to automate my homework. Later in life worked in different roles as consultant, implementer, product and project manager, sales manager, CEO and other functions. I am a person that knows a little about everything, but have very little areas of expertise where I would consider myself a superior expert compared to others in the field. That holds especially true in coding and programming.

In my current capacity I advice food companies on what technology they should apply in their organization and how. In the process I meet ambitious people in ambitious organizations with lofty goals, but barely a skill set that is matching these desires. I believe that people that design and implement solutions these days need to have a very solid understanding on what they do and how they work, since only people can execute a project that can get the most out of the software companies have licensed and implemented.

We don’t even need to discuss our ERP or Accounting software to find applications that we underutilize. My prime example is always MS-Excel. I have not met an organization in the Food industry, where MS-Excel is not being used for one thing or another. What is striking though are the different levels on what people can do with MS-Excel. In its simplest form, people use MS-Excel to calculate some formulas, add up totals and things like that. People start with elementary school level math and use MS-Excel as a large calculator. As people learn to do more and more with MS-Excel, they learn more complex things, such as conditional formatting or vLookups which leads them to more complex formulas and expressions until this is not good enough anymore and the user still wants to do more at which point he may program some functions and procedures in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) within MS-Excel, or connects live to companies databases using MS-Query. It is almost seamless. As you acquire more knowledge about doing stuff with data, you will enter the greater roam of coding on some level. The level on which you understand coding logic relates immediately to your ability to get stuff done for your employer, it is that simple. The other holds true as well, because if you do not understand at least on a fundamental level these concepts, you cannot lead, manage or drive and implementation or software project.

Last week I read on one of these tech blogs that I am following (TheNextWeb, readwriteweb, All-Things-Digital, Techcrunch, etc.) about Codeyear, and I promptly signed up. I started last year educating myself more on technology. I download pretty much any video in my areas of interest from Channel 9 at Microsoft’s MSDN webpage, put it on my IPad and watch these while travelling. Kind of funny, Microsoft delivers the content to me that Apple allows me to consume. I probably couldn’t do it without anyone of them. Microsoft puts video recorded sessions of all their major events online, whether that is TechEd, Build or MIX conferences in the US or abroad. This is great educational material. This year, I will participate in Codeyear. I want to learn more about how applications are build and what fundamental technologies are available to build them. Codeyear will send me once a week a lesson for the entire year of 2012 to teach me programming. I will let you know what comes out of it, but regardless of my success, I believe that somebody that is not able to create a little python script, can build a simple SQL statement or use complex expressions in MS-Excel or MS-Access should not really call himself an IT professional.