Skills on My Bucket List

I have some pretty traditional things on my bucket list like travelling around the world and the US. In particular I would really like to go to Southeast Asia, see the Northern Lights, and go whale watching. I also want to write a book; probably a children's book. I've had my dog for one year exactly now, and she's a pretty funny character, so maybe I'll find a story there.

There are also a few skills I still want to learn as part of this list, and one of those skills is learning how to code. And so, that's what I'm trying to do. However, I didn't really realize how many different coding languages there are, and I'm kind of feeling like I don't know where to start. I tried Googling "what's the best first coding language to learn?" and I got a very large variety of responses from that search.

So I just decided to dive in and pick a language. I found my way to Code Academy and picked Python to start with. I'm only 15% through the course, but it's easy enough so far. The tutorials on Code Academy and great, and I'm really appreciating all of the Monty "Python" jokes written in to the program. Although, I just feel like I'm learning a foreign language and all I can do is say the names of colors and count to ten.

I know this is something I'll keep working on, but I have no idea where this endeavor will take me. Coding is really so unknown to me that I'm not even sure what I can do with it once I learn it, and so it's really a discovery process. Part of me really wants to work with girls and get them into science, math, and computers, but with a degree in English, I'm not really the right person to be able to do that until I give myself more of a background in those things. Who knows where this skill will take me, but it's exactly that uncertainty that's driving me to develop it.