DEV Community: Shaibu Zachariyya

Why you should consider learning programming

Shaibu Zachariyya — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 22:30:19 +0000

I am currently working on a software project for a client. It is a project management system with an integrated accounting system .

As someone with no background in accounting I begun reading a lot of online articles and watching YouTube videos about the prestigious subject.

The aim is to have enough understanding of accounting principles and concepts to be able to implement the feature requirements of the system I'm developing.

After 2-3 weeks of non-stop research and reading, some of the concepts - double entry, credit and debit, journal entry, which accounts go into balance sheet, which accounts go into income statement - which were hitherto very confusing, begun to gradually make sense to me.

Now with the understanding of accounting out of the way I have manage to implement most of the features.

Even though there are still some bugs in the app that need fixing, I'm very proud of what I have done so far giving the fact that I started this project with zero accounting background and now hoping to finish and deploy the application as soon as possible.

In the course of my research I found accounting to be a very interesting subject. It gave me insight into how to manage my own finances.

The take home message of this post is this: It doesn't matter which career path you have taken; whether you are an accountant, a lawyer, a journalist, fashion designer, a model, project manager, scholar, teacher etc., consider taking a course in programming and this will open up an endless possibilities you could never have imagined.

Programing will give you tools and skills necessary to be able to create systems, applications and automate processes applicable to your chosen career.

Start learning programming today. Study it at your own pace. Don't rush it, it can overwhelm you.

Start now!!! and thank me later :)

Being lazy: not bad after all

Shaibu Zachariyya — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 19:58:51 +0000

It's common for a programmer to refer to himself/herself as being "lazy". This is because of a belief that "laziness" begets innovation.

For instance Imagine you are tasked to write "I'm lazy" 3 times on the screen.

This can be achieved in Python by writing the following code:

print("I'm lazy")
print("I'm lazy")
print("I'm lazy")

This is easy right. Well now what if you are asked to write this same sentence 1,000,000 (one million) times. Hahaa, I guess you will say this is punishment.

A lazy programmer will find a way to get the work done with minimum effort.

Well once upon a time, there lived a "lazy" programmer who was faced with a similar problem then he invented a concept in programming called LOOP.

A loop is a programming structure that provide a way to repeat a piece of code until a certain condition is reached. In our case the condition is met after we write the sentence one million times.

Now let's use a LOOP to solve our problem. The code is as follows:

for counter in range(1000000):
print("I'm lazy")

...and that's all. The job is done!

Incredible easy, isn't it? With 2 line of codes we are able to write "I'm lazy" one million times. How the LOOP works is beyond the scope of this post.

Computer was invented to automate our everyday "boring" repetitive tasks.

"Copy => paste" was invented because someone doesn't want to be writing the same thing over and over again.

TV remote was invented because someone was feeling "lazy" get up and change the channel over and over again.

Now you have it. The next time you find yourself feeling "lazy" about doing something, instead of complaining, you should rather start thinking about how you can create a solution for the benefit of yourself and humanity.

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” - Bill Gates : quotes.