I’m currently writing this from a smouldering hot tent in Sri Lanka. There’s not a fan in sight, but amazingly I have a decent internet connection. So I thought I’d take a minute to write this week’s article.

Yesterday I was chatting with a friend I’m traveling with about whether it’s too late to learn to code. We both agree that it’s an incredibly powerful skill. Something that can improve the productivity of almost anyone in any field.

But we’re both mid-thirties, have spent the last 10 years on the product management side of tech, and have always felt it would be too hard. As you progress through your career, it’s so easy to pigeon hole yourself. To identify as a certain role and convince yourself that’s all you can or should do.

It surprises some that I’m not a software engineer, as I’ve run tech companies for over a decade. But the skills to plan and design software are very different to writing code. And while I’ve dabbled as a hobby over the years, I’ve never taken the time to learn properly.

So about 3 months ago, I decided to change that and dive right in. I picked a language new to me (PHP with Laravel), as it’s what our team predominantly use. And to my surprise, it only took a few weeks to reach a point where I could build an application end to end (I built a client portal for Vokke).

Don’t get me wrong, to become an experienced programmer and build something sophisticated would take years. But to reach a point where you can build something useful for your company? Absolutely within reach.

But What About AI?

Every other social media post predicts that AI will soon be able to create software with nothing more than a prompt. While it may happen someday, we’re yet to see an AI model that can write code for anything significant. The vast majority of demos we see online are either basic or not reproducible.

Now is actually the perfect time to learn, because AI tools like ChatGPT make the perfect tutor. You can easily paste your code in, ask it a question, and immediately receive feedback. This drastically speeds up the learning curve.

Convinced But Not Sure Where to Start?

If you want to build web software, I highly recommend Jeffrey Way’s 30 Days to Learn Laravel (PHP/Laravel course). I didn’t know a line of PHP before starting and found it very approachable.

If you want to write programs to automate manual tasks or build AI applications, I recommend Learn Python the Hard Way (don’t let the title put you off) and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (both Python courses).

Happy building!