It’s official; you really can’t truly function online these days unless you have some coding ability. I do not come from a computer science background, but I’ve always had an enthusiasm for computers, new stuff, and technology. I had a fifth grade teacher who took us to the computer lab once a week and taught us the essentials of BASIC on our Apple IIe computers. We had the IIc at home, and I once wrote a program for it (saved on a giant 5 1/2 floppy) that was a simple quiz game testing geography skills.

When I finally finished the game I made my parents play it. Everything went perfectly until they got to “What city is Big Ben in?” and they kept getting it wrong. They told me the game was broken. I told them duh, Big Ben was in Paris, so the game was just fine. Okay, so the code was just fine but the answer wasn’t. I was nine. Quit laughing.

I didn’t major in computer science; I started out in Physics with an Astronomy emphasis, became disenchanted after I realized that our department believed that theoretical training was the only thing that mattered and I’d never get to use the telescope. I switched to a double major in Humanities and History (much to my parents’ dismay) and got a degree that guaranteed I could be an assistant manager at a very fine Taco Bell one day.

At any rate, I can now see the first major gap in my education that will no doubt afflict many of my generation. I can’t code. I’m adept at HTML and a little Java, and I can modify PHP templates in WordPress, but only very slightly. I can decipher which chunks do what and rearrange them, but this is more like arranging tiles in a mosaic than taking my own brush and painting my own picture. I’m limited. If I find this annoying now I can’t even imagine what it will be like for current high schoolers in ten years or so. They don’t teach coding at all in school, and it will become more and more critical to have some basic ability as our economy meshes ever more with technology.

They used to have typing class, and typing skills of 70 words per minute or more with over 95% accuracy used to be a standard if you wanted a lot of desk jobs. Having some ability to code, it seems, will become one of the new office standards. It used to matter that you could put on your resume that you knew how to use Windows or WordPerfect. Now it seems stupid to mention it. The new bonus items for your resume are IT skills and software fundamentals.

My lack of coding ability won’t hold me back in my career, as it’s not essential to what I do. In fact, this entry is just an attempt to distract myself from the fact that I’m really annoyed that I don’t know how to fix my WordPress theme so that it will adjust to fill out the entire browser horizontally instead of staying in the same cramped vertical layout with too much blank space on the right. Oh, well.