I learned first to code in Basic as a freshman in 1969 at Michigan State University. I was fair at it.

As a sophomore, they taught us COBOL for business and FORTRAN for science. I was bad at both.

As a junior, I learned assembly language for the massive Unisys computer at the university. I loved it and I was good at it.

I became a systems analyst and then a consultant. None of it involved coding.

When the microcomputer was born I bought my first Tandy/Radioshack TRS-80 and later I opened one of the first computer stores in Michigan. It crashed when the big box stores appeared.

By the turn of the century, I discovered the book Programming Bots, Spiders, and Intelligent Agents in Visual C++ by David Pallman and I was hooked on programming automation tools. I raised a million dollars from a bot I wrote from that knowledge.

A decade later, I was in Moscow, coding Google extension bots that mimicked dating site users with the aim of getting dates with Russian girls when I spoke no Russian at all. I got lots of dates but still couldn't hold a conversation in person.

Now I'm over 70, in Manhattan, learning to code on the blockchain. I'm pretty good at Javascript, but God, don't make me learn Python.