How Do You Share Your Love for Coding with Friends and Family?

#discuss #beginners #codenewbie

For many of us, coding is not just a hobby or a profession, it's a passion. But how do you share that passion with the people in your lives who may not understand or have the same interests? Here are a few ideas for ways to introduce coding to your friends and family:

Create something useful - like a website for a friend’s business, perhaps.
Share interesting tech news - this is a great way to spark a conversation and get others interested in what you do.
Teach them basic coding concepts - HTML and CSS are accessible, and teaching your friends and family some basic concepts could be a fun way to spend time together…and gain a new skill!
Participate in coding events - get your loved ones to tag along and cheer you on! They get to see firsthand what it's like to be a coder and meet other people who share your passion.

How do you share your love for coding with your friends and family?

Top comments (10)

krlz • Mar 10 '23

Its always great to integrate family not just to code, but in general for this new era of amazing technology, I have some list to share

Show your grandma how to use emojis in her texts and explain how they work (for ages 60+).
Play coding games like Scratch or Code.org with your younger cousins (ages 6-10).
Help your teenage niece or nephew build a website for their school project (ages 13-18).
Share a YouTube tutorial on how to build a basic app with your tech-savvy cousin (ages 20-30).
Teach your 7-year-old nephew how to code a simple animation using JavaScript.
Introduce your aunt to the concept of machine learning and how it's used in everyday life (ages 40+).
Explain to your little brother how search engines like Google work (ages 10-14).
Help your college-aged cousin understand the basics of data structures and algorithms.
Share coding resources for beginners with your dad who's interested in learning more (ages 50+).
Show your 8-year-old cousin how to code a simple game using Python.
Help your high school-aged sister build a chatbot for her extracurricular club (ages 15-18).
Explain to your grandpa how to use an online spreadsheet like Google Sheets (ages 70+).
Share a TED Talk on the importance of coding with your younger sister (ages 10-14).
Help your cousin create a personalized automation script for their work (ages 25-35).
Introduce your young niece or nephew to coding through fun educational toys like Ozobot (ages 4-8).
Explain the basics of cybersecurity and how to protect yourself online to your older family members (ages 50+).
Show your sibling how to use GitHub to collaborate on coding projects (ages 20-30).
Teach your little cousin how to create a simple web page using HTML and CSS (ages 7-11).
Share coding resources for intermediate level learners with your tech-savvy uncle (ages 40+).
Play coding-themed board games like "Code Names" or "Robot Turtles" with your family at your next game night!

Learning to code can be a fun and rewarding experience for everyone, regardless of age or experience level. Spreading the coding love and empower our family can be accomplish , any more ideas?

William Torrez • Jun 22 '23

attitude is everything

Chris Greening • Mar 10 '23

Recently got my sister into programming for her career in anthropology

She was interning at a lab and had to manually download something like 1,500 files from a website and compile information about the downloads into a CSV. Her advisor had her doing this all by hand and it was going to take her 30-40 hours of extremely tedious, unpaid labor over the course of a few weeks so she asked if I could help her write a program that would do the work for her. A couple short hours later we had all the files scraped, processed, and ready to go 😎

Since then I've been teaching her R and she's been getting super excited about all the possibilities opening up for her, we're going to start collaborating on open source data dashboards that are anthropology related and I could see her even getting into a bit of anthro-adjacent data science

Chris Greening • Mar 10 '23 • Edited

This was a fun challenge as well:

had a friend working at a physics lab and she had a similar manual data processing task where she had to use a custom proprietary GUI to convert specific equipment's data from one format to another - essentially pressing the same few buttons, selecting a file, and pressing some more buttons (which would've been fine except there were thousands of files)

She asked if I could automate it and I was like sure why not, only challenge was I was 300 miles (483 km) away and we couldn't screenshare, had to basically write a desktop automation without being able to see or test on the machine lol ended up working very smoothly though and she became interesting in coding after that (and I'm p sure the lab continued to use my program even after she left lol)

NLxDoDge • Mar 10 '23

Most people I know are just not really that tech savvy, my dad actually send the same e-mail 6 times yesterday, because my brother installed Outlook on the family laptop without saying a thing.

So the send e-mail inbox didn't synchronize when right click sending an attachment with the other program 😒

But I always go to deep into the details for people to understand. So that's my tip, try go gauge what people do and don't understand and talk further on such a level. Else they get A: Bored or B: Overwhelmed with info.

Mbenga • Mar 10 '23

I try to code all the private joke wich sounds like "Imagine if there a website for ..."

Calin Baenen • Mar 10 '23

I show my love for coding when I bug them with it orwith try to teach them terminology.

vance • Mar 17 '23

If you're not a web person, another cool alternative to "make a website for your friend" is to make simple tools to make someone's life easier. My roommate does a job that involves finding typos in Google Sheets, and there wasn't any Sheets extension yet that can spellcheck the entire spreadsheet en masse, so I wrote one for her. Did a hacky job, but she still keeps thanking me for how much easier it makes her work! A great small example could be writing a little script that someone can use to automate a task they do a lot.