Coding with MS notepad

Microsoft's notepad, a bare bones text editor. That is what I learned to code with. Mind you this was in 2020, so the idea would seem rather primative. But I think it actually makes sense and has given me a better understanding of what I am doing. I will admit it is tedious and I can get stuff done a whole lot faster using VScode now. But the fact there was no auto coloring, no emmit to suggest a method gave me a solid foundation of understanding. I had google and stack overflow. I had to stare at my little bits of code and find the syntax error myself. I had to arrange and indent my code into a readable format manually. While most people might find this excruciating, and at times it was, I am overall happy for the expirence.

This was a choice

I wanted to start this way. As a kid I figured out how to write some bits of html and css into notepad then open the file with a browser. I messed around with Frontpage a little bit but didn't have my own copy of the software. This was fun but I never stuck with it. I guess I always just wanted to know how websites worked, even then as a kid. When the tech bug bit me again during the pandemic I did a lot of reading first. I knew about VScode, Atom and the rest of the mainstream code editors but in the back of my mind I remembered my childhood tinkering. I knew I could just manipulate text and get it to run in a browser and that, to me, was way more exciting. So I started making landing pages for businesses that didn't exist. Writing all my HTML, CSS and Javascript in different instances of notepad. If that sounds like a god awful developer experience, it was, however it drove the basic building blocks into my brain. It was trial and error, the true scientific method approach to web development. I had also been working through the basic lessons on codecadamy and w3school as well as using MDN and a bunch of blogs and youtube videos for reference. So I wasn't walking blindly in the night as they say. I feel this approach led to me wanting to learn the computer science fundamentals much earlier than if I used VScode and frameworks to make my first projects. I had to figure out what questions to ask and this really helped my problem solving. Eventually the tediousness got to me and I downloaded VScode then started learning about Bootstrap. But I certainly appreciate all of the features of basic tools like this, so much more than I feel I would have if I started with them. I don’t take anything for granted now.

Lessons I learned

Starting with nothing but text and working my way up has taught me alot.
I now need to know what problem a tool seeks to fix before I want to use it. Then when I want to use it I love learning how it does it. I don't feel I would have that same outlook if not for my so-called primitive approach. One of the nightmares yet ah-ha moments of the whole thing was how I came to understand the Document object in javascript. Over and over again I would try to access an HTML element in javascript and get an error in the browser. Here is why.

Let x = getElementById(‘elementName’);

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to understand why this didn't work. But I now have a better understanding of how a browser works and how Javascript objects work in a very applied fashion. I might have been able to learn this information otherwise but I don't know if I would retain it as deeply as I have. Since I have a background in music I think about technology like a symphony. Each musician is like a piece of software or hardware. On their own each instrument would sound like a sporadic mess of notes but when combined make something beautiful that flows and conveys a message. That's why I think learning this stuff is so difficult, it's like trying to conduct when you don't know how to read music. Now forget conducting, try composing. You need to know how all the parts fit together, who comes in when and for how long and most importantly why that all works together. Good music is often said to be greater than the sum of its parts and I feel this is also true with technology.

In closing I don't think anyone else needs to take this approach but I am very grateful for it. The wide variety of things computers can do means you can pick your own path based on what interests you. This was my path and I am excited to see where it goes. I still feel like a tinkering kid when I am coding sometimes. Playing with something far out of my grasp of understanding and just seeing what it does . That child-like curiosity I feel is what drives a lot of us to keep learning. I hope you gained something from this and have fun coding with notepad.