Why am i starting to code?

What I'm looking for is to break into the tech space and explore its capabilities, but I feel it's best to explain how I got where I am in order to show you where I'm headed.

My adventure all began sometime early 2024. I had retaken control of my restaurant's GP responsibilities, and at some point down the line, I began to find a few repeated tasks tedious and tiresome, demotivating me from the real work at hand. So this is where the fun began, and I started to look into the full capabilities of the Excel program.

My discoveries led me to learn that Excel has a very useful skill—it can scrape websites! Amazing! No more tiresome copying and pasting weekly-monthly numbers in order to keep my documents up to date and relevant. I can automate this process and save myself hair-pulling moments, freeing myself up to focus on the important things that require a keen eye—the analysing and understanding of my usual day-to-day work.

However, it wasn't as easy as I had initially thought. I spent weeks trying and tweaking opportunities and methods to get Excel to do what I was asking, constantly scouring the web for why I was getting these errors and this constant bombardment of blocks and failed access. You see, the company I work for has (respectfully) all their data hidden in websites that require a series of authentications and limited access to authorised personnel.

Now this back and forth of idea and failure, to new idea, to another pitfall, threw me through a plethora of failed methods. I obviously tried plain scraping through external methods and Excel's built-in style with zero results. I attempted to dabble in macros... however, given my limited knowledge of tech at the time, I decided to back out of that pretty quickly upon realising the potential harm it could cause.

Then I finally ended up in API territory. Now, I'll warn you—this is not a victory story, so don't get your hopes up reading about a genius masterclass from an untrained inside hacker. This is a story of hope, failure, and perseverance. When I learned that API keys were a possibility, I messaged my helpful central support team in a call to arms—and was quite quickly turned away.

Probably should have listened. In fairness, to this day my pursuit hasn't got me what I wanted and I'm still copying and pasting the same data on the regular. But if you've been paying attention, I ignore "no's" and instead see a different path—try something else. So I did. I learned to access the source code of a web page! At the time I thought, I'm so close here—I must be moments from cracking the case! I found an API key—my impossible holy grail is now within my grasp!

Denied! Overwhelmed with the emotions of the highs and lows I had experienced on this idea for weeks at this point, I once more reached out to my central team in hopes of aid, and this time... was still told no, but directed to a different platform of individuals within the company who are all in the tech department on Slack. Now this was eye-opening!

I began by posting in the channel what I was attempting to do, what I'd tried, and what went wrong. And I received the politest "you will never achieve what you're trying to do" in my life! This interaction brought me into contact with two individuals: Ed and Liam. Now, Liam has helped me a lot and been someone I've truly admired. We've had some good chats and it's kept me intrigued and yet confident that the future of tech in this company lies in good hands.

Now, my brief interaction with Ed—he described my best route as "learning a little Python" and automating a few CSV emails, and that's probably as close as I would get. Now, looking into it, learning a whole programming language just for this one task seemed daunting, and given my normal workload and my real life all around me, all this got put aside and essentially forgotten about for some time. It's like I had given up.

Fast forward to November and I've just bought a house and am preparing for Christmas! Realising this important step is now settled and a lot of the day-to-day stress levels have dropped down a few pegs, I decided to venture into the coding world. I looked back and took Ed's advice—I was going to learn Python!

Roll on January 2025 and I've committed, got myself a laptop, and began my Python journey. I'm watching videos, I'm learning on Mimo, SoloLearn, reading *Automate the Boring Stuff*, and watching countless YouTube videos. This journey consumes me! And what I learn most is how little I know at all. Excited to push the boundaries and to begin tackling my 2024 problems, I start building a program for work.

Now I'm successful in this. It's not quite what I had planned—I decided to tackle small steps first. So essentially what this program does is open all the paperwork we print out on a Monday morning, change the date on all of them, including multiple sheets on more complex paperwork, and print them all out before anyone arrives at the building.

Initially, this was a groundbreaking development for me and I was overjoyed with what I had achieved. And this was the turning point. I put a post on LinkedIn to explain my passion for learning this beautiful tech world, and lo and behold, it's acknowledged by a familiar face—Liam—who introduces me to a fellow employee, Julian.

Now, Julian has been an exceptional help and guide for me through all this—super helpful and encouraging—and has helped bring me onto the path our company is working on most with web development. So I began to learn some HTML, CSS, and a touch of JavaScript. Fast forward to May 2025 and I begin making my personal website that you're reading right now!

Thank you for the read, thank you for the support, and if you have suggestions—or if you just wanna reach out—please find my details below!