Editor’s Faves — Top 10: Why Coding Knowledge Is the Future of Literacy

Read these top 10 tech writers on Illumination Group of Publications

For thousands of years, only a few knew how to read and write.

Those who could read and write — it may still be true in some far off areas — were considered divinely gifted. These readers and writers of ancient times used to think they were prophets and godsends.

It is also true about coding.

Less than two percent of all human beings know something about coding. But most of us feel an urge to learn programming.

Since I spent three years learning to code — in the process of setting up my edutech startup — I can guarantee you it is as easy as learning a new language.

Thousands of years ago, if you wrote on a paper two simple instructions — like 1)Raise your hand, and 2)Clap — and the readers performed those steps, the audience would have been stunned thinking how you could control human beings by just writing on a piece of paper. Writing was a cutting edge technology. The unsuspecting masses followed anyone who claimed to know the path to heaven.

Coding is something similar.

It is no magic, and it is not difficult at all. I’ll write about the basic concepts of programming, in a fun way — similar to one of my pieces published in the Startup.

When you learn to code, you tell the computer to “make this letter jump,” and it jumps. You say, “let it jump for 5 seconds,” and it jumps for five seconds. In JQuery — an early JavaScript library — you actually wrote “fadeIn” to allow the text to appear on screen as if it was fading in.

If you know absolutely nothing about coding, you might have found the above a bit of gibberish.

The real magic of programming is not in logic — logic is yours, and usually it is pathetic — but in execution. You write a code in ten hours, and the computer performs it in around one-thousandth part of a second. Generally, when you code, you get long lists of errors. Then you spend days researching and correcting those errors until the program starts working.

We begin this list with our top writer, Agnes Laurens — who plays violin and loves music — learns to code. She’s the right person to guide you on your journey to abandon your preconceived notions and start learning the language computers understand.

Here is a list of our top 10 writers who are telling you different things from learning to code to object-oriented programming — but it includes less technical pieces as well:

10. How To Code With SoloLearn

Agnes Laurens is a radio journalist, violinist, a mother, and a painter. She is a fabulous writer from the Netherlands. She is an editor for Illumination as well.

In this interesting story, she is sharing how she learned to code and found that it was not difficult. Don’t miss this one.

“A girl can’t code”, people say often to me, but I think this is very presumptuous. People assume all sorts of things that might not be true. For example that men are not good for the fashion industry. Look at black people now, they have been put in corners they don’t want to be, and they don’t need to be. There are always groups that are willing to belittle other groups of people.

Since a few years ago, I have been trying to learn code. Every attempt failed.

9. The Best Programming Languages to Learn First — A Roadmap for the Indecisive Beginner

Mark Basson loves to write about programming. You’ll love his writing style.

Anyone can learn to code, but what programming languages should absolute beginners learn first? There are so many choices! If you are suffering decision paralysis, then I encourage you to stop researching and instead use the time to learn something that will get you off to a flying start.

The following is a roadmap that will get you into the world of programming in the most frictionless, time-efficient, and cost-effective way possible. I won’t give you a multitude of choices. I will show you the exact courses to take so you don’t have to do any more searching.

8. OOP Concepts explained with real world scenario + (java)

Nisal Sudila is a programmer and a writer. He is telling the basic concepts of object oriented programming to our readers. If you are new to OOP, don’t miss this one.

OOP concepts cannot be grasped without understanding these 6 core concepts in programming. They are,

Class

Object

Encapsulation

Inheritance

Abstraction

Polymorphism

7. Data Literacy — A New Skill to Fuel Career Growth, Especially in a Non-Tech Company

Andy Teoh is an advanced analytics professional. He is an excellent writer and he knows what he is talking about.

Understanding data is becoming a major skill in an age where data is abundant. Do check his other work as well.

Data literacy is the ability to read, analyze, and communicate to others with data in context, including an understanding of data origins and constructs. In this golden era of digital and data, we do not need to be Facebook or Walmart to build a data lake in our company. With the advancement in both hardware and cloud-based systems, this opportunity is now readily available to every company for a modest cost.

As organizations amass much more data at an unprecedented rate, it becomes increasingly important for all employees — and not just data scientists — to be data literate so that we can contribute better in our roles and help our companies sharpen their competitive edge in today’s aggressive global economy. According to a survey sponsored by Qilk, 94% of respondents indicated that data literacy is key to developing professional credibility to boost career growth.

6. Eight Ways to Identify a Fake New Facebook Friend Request

Tom Handy is an investor and an excellent writer. His style is simple, direct, and engaging. If you like this story, do check his other work.

You just received a friend request on Facebook from someone you don’t know. The most likely thing you do is accept the friend request. The friend request was from a pretty woman who you think is harmless.

Wrong!

This could be an online scammer using a fake profile trying to connect with you so they could ruin your life. These days it is very easy for someone to create a fake profile and then scam you. I have figured out a few clues that I will share with you that you need to know.

5. How Is Technology Changing the Way We Read?

Jason Ward is a freelance journalist, author, and writer. His writing style is simple, direct, and engaging. You’ll fall in love with his work. Don’t miss this one.

For several millennia reading was limited to a very select few. Books, scrolls and parchments were written by hand and were both prized and rare. Only a small percentage of people were able to read.

Then, in the 15th century, that began to change when Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press. Literacy rates began to rise but progress was slow. However, the Industrial Revolution and the ability to mass-produce paper soon changed that. Education, news, and the rise of popular novels and literature soon became mainstream, leading to a correlating growth in things like libraries and bookshops. People discovered the joy of the written word.

4. Finding Order In The New World

Stuart Englander loves to write inspiring stories. He is an excellent writer. You’ll love his short story.

They arrived as a group of two dozen adventurers to find a barren and desolate plain, and there was no turning back now. Within a few years of sweat and toil, they turned the soil into a burgeoning landscape, and ultimately, it became a fully functioning ecosystem. This group of like-minded pioneers had much to be proud of, not the least of which was the creation of a new community, a garden of prosperity.

Marvin Stafford perched on his favourite boulder, a pinkish-red block just outside his door. He stared across the still, rough landscape outside the compound, reminiscing over the past fifty years. He’d been here from the beginning, an unlikely leader who became the driving force behind the village’s success.

3. Worlds in The Magic of a Gamer’s Brain

Tree Langdon is a writer and a poet. She is very intelligent and her writing style is simple but thought-provoking. She is a superb writers.

In this story, she shares an experience when she attended a writing course with some young people who played a lot of games. Read to learn what happened next.

Recently, I was surprised to discover how computers and gaming can enhance your creative writing skills.

I enrolled in writing course at our local college and our first assignment was to write a short story using a scene to create emotion.

As the students read their stories in class, I realized I approached writing from a different angle than the other students. In one way, that made sense. I have a lot more years to draw from, so I pulled from those experiences. But that wasn’t quite what was going on.

2. Review on Li-Fi: An Advancement of Wireless Network

Arslan Mirza is a freelance writer. He is interested in new technologies and he wants to share his information.

The concept of visible light wireless communication (Li-Fi) technology was proposed by Professor Hass in the United Kingdom at the TED (Global Technology and Entertainment Design) conference in 2011, and the preliminary application of optical transmission data was successfully realized in 2012. In October 2013, the Fudan University experiment also successfully realized the wireless transmission of visible light indoors.

Through this technology, one LED light can be used for the normal Internet access of 4 computers, with a maximum rate of 3.25 Gbps and an average Internet rate of 150 Mbps

1. A Hackathon Gave Birth To One of The Most Influential Company

Shubham Pathania is a coder and a writer. He lives between fiction and reality — his words, because he is a great writer. Do encourage him by reading his story.

In 2005, Biz Stone and his co-worker Evan Williams left Google to start their own business called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform, but when Apple launched iTunes podcasting and made Odeo’s podcasting platform irrelevant, they decide to create something different.

Williams decided Odeo’s future was not in podcasting, and later that year, he told the company’s employees to start coming up with ideas for something new.

Final Thoughts

If your story was selected as one of the Top 10, please share another one of your stories in the comments with a brief introduction and a short review that can convince a reader to read your piece. (Please write the review in the third person and start it with your name.)

I must have missed something today. I cannot read every story on Technology Hits. Dr Mehmet Yildiz, the Chief Editor and Founder of Illumination Group of Publications, read, highlighted, and applauded every good story when he started his publications. He still reads almost all of the good ones. I try — and fail daily — to read all of the masterpieces.

So, help me to find and rank the best work of the writers of Technology Hits.

Happy hacking.

To improve your chances of success as a writer, read these highly recommended curation guidelines:

You can read my curated stories here.