Programming for Late Bloomers: My Story of Learning Code in my 30s

I started really getting interested in coding when I was about 32 and didn’t get my first professional Web Developer job (Junior!) until I was 34. I thought I might tell my story and also share my thoughts on how there are actually advantages with starting programming a bit later in life.

How I got into Programming

I was working at a major corporate firm at the time and I was a team leader with seven email marketing specialists as direct reports. I really liked aspects of the team leading role but I also liked the hands on work too and didn’t want to lose that completely. I remember we used a system that generated raw csv files with certain data, which would then be used for reporting. I would download this csv and then manually go through certain steps in excel to convert the raw csv into a fancy looking excel document with charts and pivot tables.

As I was doing this I lost track of time completely and became immersed in a world of possibility. I was coding!

I distinctly remember, when formatting the fifth report that week with pretty much the same manual steps, that there must be a more efficient way to do this. Obviously there was and this was macros. But with macros you had to record the exact steps you took and then it would save…