At the age of twelve
My mother bought my first computer at times when everyone having a computer used to learn to code as well. Although I had been enthusiastic about both coding and playing with my Commodore +4, I was never able to see through many lines of code and not to make silly mistakes while transforming my ideas into Basic programming language. So I never got immersed to coding and didn’t become a programmer eventually.
Getting back to programming with web automation
Way back in 2012 when I was already doing all sorts of search engine marketing I started to code again. I was looking for effective tools to automate my mass link building tasks, and instead of sticking with yet another link submission software, I came across a wonderful generic web automation tool. It took me two weeks to write – and other two weeks to re-write – my first script which could do the tedious work of checking the status of our directory submissions one by one. I was just happy that this script was virtually replacing a half-time employee, and wasn’t really thinking about how important visual programming would become for me in the future.
Visual programming for online marketers
During that last three years, I had been spending more and more time with using these tools – originally built for web spamming. This experience has gradually transformed what I think about an online marketer could and should do when it comes to aggregating, processing and analyzing data – from the web, our own analytics or other internal data sources. Although I admit there are faster and more scalable ways of doing this, having a few easy-to-use software at hand makes me able to relatively quickly get insights from the data I’m working with or complete those tasks which have a highly repetitive nature – without being a programmer or employing one.