Getting Started

A few days ago, I decided to see if I could learn how to make computer programs.  This happens just about every day, but in my case it is a little strange because I already have a career as a history professor.  In college I studied history and finished my Ph.D. in 2008.  Since then, I have been working at a small liberal arts college using computers but never much thinking about how they work.

Honestly, I can't think of a particular reason why I am interested in computer programming outside of my teenage years.  As a teen, I assembled my own computers, worked as "SysOp" of my own Bulletin Board System (BBS), and tinkered with my computer endlessly mostly in an effort to get it to play a host of computer games.  I worked with some Basis computer language and even did a high school independent study where I designed a lengthy but simple program.  I did some work on some very simple text games.  However, ultimately, I drifted away from this as I attended college and at this point I am no more computer literate than your average 35 year old person.

I don't know what I want to do with the skill of computer programming, but I do have a mini-goal.  I want to create an ap to go along with my basic history courses.  I don't exactly know how that will work yet, but I will be sharing my ups and downs in the coding world here.  After a basic google search, I have begin work in Code Academy which advertises itself as a (free!) site to help people teach themselves to code.  I completed the basic HTML lessons and am now around halfway through Ruby.  I also have begun to look at the MIT Open Courses (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) and have started on the basic computer science course.

More to come as I have more to say!