I started programming in elementary school when my parents gave me a programming book aimed at children. Since then, I can’t imagine my life without programming. The days during the year when I don’t program something are very rare.

On the one hand I program for my work, of course. But I also like programming in my private life. Because of my other passion, blogging, I was looking for a suitable blog software. I tried many different systems, but found none that met my expectations.

Since I know programming, I was able to build my own system completely according to my own ideas.

I really appreciate this ability. Just today I was in the situation to sort my photo collection a little bit. I had a folder with quite a lot of photos from previous phones. I wanted to divide this rather large folder into smaller folders, sorted by year and month. I searched a bit on the internet, but didn’t find a suitable solution.

Finally, I quickly wrote myself a script that reads the year and month from the file name and moves the file to the appropriate folder.

Without programming experience I probably would have had to sort the photos by hand. An effort that would have taken quite a bit of time, I’m sure. But programming and running my script took less than five minutes.

I think that even without a software developer job, learning to program would be worthwhile. For one thing, it can be helpful in dealing with computers when you can’t find a suitable solution and quickly build something yourself. On the other hand, programming is supposed to improve logical thinking and creativity.