How I Learned to Code

Chapter One: The Sourdough Incident

I did not set out to become a programmer. I set out to automate my sourdough starter feeding schedule, which is the kind of sentence that makes sense if you have ever maintained a sourdough starter and no sense at all if you have not. The starter's name was Kevin. Kevin needed to be fed every twelve hours with exactly 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water, and if I forgot, Kevin died, and if Kevin died, my bread died, and if my bread died, my bakery's only bestseller died.

So I bought a Raspberry Pi, watched fourteen hours of YouTube tutorials, and wrote the worst Python script in the history of computing. It did not automate Kevin's feeding. What it did was send me a text message every twelve hours that said "FEED KEVIN OR ELSE," which was technically a notification system and therefore, I maintain, a valid first project.

The script had forty-seven lines of code and at least thirty bugs, but when that first text message arrived at 6 AM on a rainy Wednesday, I felt something I had not felt since I pulled my first perfect loaf out of the oven: the unreasonable, irrational joy of making something from nothing.