Reflections on a life of programming (so far)

I think it was Mark Zuckerberg who said that being able to program computers is like having a superpower. He was promoting computer programming to young people at the time, but I think I can relate to that.

I thought that moving to an artist role (3D animation) will take me away from computer programming, but as it turns out, programming is still very useful in this line of work. Many DCCs like Maya, Nuke, Blender and Houdini benefit from coding, as they have Python/C++ APIs to extend functionality. Even as I work as a Technical Assistant, where I mainly manage the render farm and disk storage, I use Python every now and then to automate my workflow.

I'm glad to have learnt coding at an early age. I picked up BASIC and Visual Basic when I was in year 9 (as far as I recall). Then in year 11, I went to a computer coding camp where they taught HTML, which officially started my journey into coding.

I do get very immersed in coding when I do though, which is good and bad. It is good in that I get super-focused in the task, but it is not so good that I forgo sleep sometimes to get a piece of code to compile.

Nevertheless, the world is changing and it is important to be computer literate. Everyone can use a word processor and a spreadsheet, but if you can code, and do it well, it is a skill that can make you more marketable in a competitive workplace.