This week, why an employer might want to know when employees are at their desks, Google’s parent company is worth big bucks, and why that make people sit up and get serious about this plan to get kids learning to program.

Somebody’s watching me

London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper installed workplace monitors at the desk of reporters earlier this month. The company claimed that the sensors were being used to help come up with an energy efficiency plan. The devices provide information on when a desk is in use.

Buzzfeed reported the news. Within a few hours, the Telegraph had removed the monitors.

Learning to code

There are two reasons I want to talk about coding.

One is that Drex Live producer, Grace, has set a goal to learn to code this year and asked for advice on where to start.

The other is because the B.C. government has declared that all students in the province will get opportunities to learn to code, but exactly what that means isn’t entirely clear.

Simply, coding refers to providing instructions to tell computers what to do. In a way, talking about coding is too broad to be useful.

You can start to understand how coding works, though, by doing logic puzzles and just practicing thinking about instructional steps to complete tasks.

At some point, you need to identify what you want to use the coding for, because that will inform the language that you need to use.

HTML and Javascript are languages used to create web pages. C++ and Python are languages used to create applications.

Keep in mind that computers are everywhere, and each of them requires code to operate.

There are simple tasks like getting the stove to turn on at 3:30 so the casserole is ready to eat at dinnertime. And programs can get very complex, such as when you want to provide instructions that tell computers how to perform their own programming tasks.

Those wanting to learn to code can do so online, for free.

A good place to start is Code.org and the Hour of Code initiative. These sites are geared towards kids, but provide do a great job of demystifying the concept of coding.

The Khan Academy has it’s own Hour of Code, as well as a handful of tutorials teaching HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS), Javascript, and SQL.

There’s also computer science classes on algorithms, cryptography, and information theory.

Brilliant is another place to learn some basics for free. This site has fun little quizzes that teach the concepts behind computation and programming theory:

• Types and data structures
• “Functionals and conditionals”: https://brilliant.org/computer-science/computer-science/functions-and-conditionals/
• Algorithms, cryptography, simulations

If you get through that and are interested enough to maybe consider spending some money to learn more, you can check out Code School, which has some free tutorials, and also others you can take with a subscription.

One of the free courses is Rails for Zombies, which will teach you how to create a Twitter-like application using Ruby on Rails is a web application framework created with the programming language, Ruby.

Alphabet comes before Apple

Alphabetically, the company formerly known as Google precedes Apple. And for the first time ever this week, Alphabet was worth more than the computer company from San Francisco.

After reporting year-end earnings on February 1, which showed big gains in ad revenue on mobile devices, trading of the company’s stock pushed its value to in the neighbourhood of US$570 billion.

Apple’s market capitalization at the same time was around $539.

Keep in mind that Alphabet, the company that has Google as a subsidiary, doesn’t have much by way of inventory. The company has some devices – tablets, mobile phones, streaming devices – in its portfolio. But most of the value of the company comes from advertising, algorithms, and potential.

In other words, the knowledge economy.

Now do you see why learning to code is so critical?