Do you know how to code?

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Do you know how to code? Does using code help in your community role?

With a background in Geography, Iā€™m still finding my feet in the online community world :smiley:

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I do, but primarily because I came from the software engineering world. It doesnā€™t directly help day-to-day, but there are times digging into the community platform, creating reports, or building emails having that experience comes in handy.

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No, butā€¦. Sort of. I grew up a geek and messing around with PHP forums and then ran a web hosting company in high school. I never really learned to code though, I could just read it. Fast forward to getting into the community world ~7 years ago, and I ended up relearning how to hack stuff on the Khoros platform. Less the coding and more the being willing to hack and deal with issues made me much more successful but definitely unique to me/roles Iā€™ve had probably more than most ā€œcommunityā€ gigs.

With that said, Iā€™ve had engineers for years now, and would never take a community role without one. The ability to dream up, and then do, literally anything, in a very short amount of time, is super magical when done right. It adds a whole other layer to what a community can do.

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Thanks @justindirose. Which languages have you worked with? Do you find them easy to learn?

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Thatā€™s really interesting to consider @Mallclerks. Do you brand yourself as a team, or do clients supply your engineers?

Which languages have you found the most helpful to know?

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HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby primarily - and then some frameworks built on CSS, JS, and Ruby.

Iā€™d say HTML is the easiest as itā€™s only structural markup, followed by CSS. These are all about presentation - how things look on the page. Really helpful for email building and tweaking community themes if you donā€™t have developer resources to help.

JS/Ruby on the other hand are harder to learn. Iā€™d recommend having a small project to work on, do a few tutorials to get the basics down, and start working on it to learn. Itā€™s a deep well to explore, but even having some basics can be really helpful!

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Thanks @justindirose, I think thatā€™s a really good idea to learn to code whilst working on a small project - youā€™ll see what you are trying to achieve and know when youā€™ve got it right :laughing:

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Iā€™m over like a ~40 person Community team at Upwork, so yes team. Our engineer sits within our group as well as technical/product manager. As for languages, thatā€™s part of the ā€œIā€™m not an engineerā€ part, I couldnā€™t even say. I know HTML/CSS/JavaScript I can read it like English, I couldnā€™t even name another 5 languages probably though. For the most part though, they are all the same (and again, this is where every actual engineer will slap me for saying that probably :joy:).

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I see! Thanks for clarifying @Mallclerks :smiley: Likewise, my understanding of the different lanuages is limited :sweat_smile: