QBasic and the sea

I grew up in a family where both parents were highly educated, and where learning never stopped at the end of the school day. My father is a hydrographer and oceanographer. He measures the sea, rivers, ports and dams: how deep the water is, how the ground below it changes, where a ship can safely go. Next to that work he taught himself to program, because the data he collected needed software that did not exist yet.

When I was eight, he sat me in front of our computer and opened QBasic. A blue screen, a blinking cursor and a few lines of code that made the machine do exactly what we told it. I loved it immediately. He kept teaching me, step by step, and programming became a normal part of my childhood.

The most important lesson came later, and it came from watching him, not from the code. My father did not program because programming was interesting. He programmed because he had a problem to solve: survey data that had to become a reliable chart. The code was only the tool.

That is the sentence I still carry with me: programming is a good skill, but it does not solve problems by itself. Solving problems is the skill companies are looking for. Every chapter that follows is a variation of that idea.

What this chapter taught me

Learn the problem before you write the code. A program is only as valuable as the problem it removes.