{
    "byline": null,
    "charset": "UTF-8",
    "dir": null,
    "excerpt": "I first learned to code when I was sixteen, back when the spectre of uncool nerdiness still hung over everything to do with computers and programming them. In our school's ancient computer lab we had a retired chemical engineer step us through the basics of writing programs in VB.Net (version 6, I believe), with the whole \"building forms with drop-down components\" style of developing UIs and then writing code behind them to bring them to life. The first project I built was a basic tide calculator, and I even wrote my own functions to approximate sines and cosines using a Taylor series expansion. We got taught the importance of comments and documentation from someone serious about engineering practice, and while I'm not sure I'd teach new programmers this way (certainly not using VB.Net), but all in all, I don't think this was the worst possible introduction to programming.",
    "lang": null,
    "length": 20740,
    "publishedTime": null,
    "siteName": null,
    "title": "We should rethink how we teach people to code"
}