FOUNDATIONS / LESSON 01
What is Code?
Understanding how computers follow instructions
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FOUNDATIONS / LESSON 01
Understanding how computers follow instructions
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Code is a set of instructions that tells a computer what to do. That's the whole scary thing. Think of it like a recipe... a recipe tells you how to bake a cake, and code tells a computer how to do a task.
Even if you never write any yourself, knowing what code is helps you out.
For the record, I'm not a developer either. I came up through SEO and local marketing, picked up Claude Code having never used it, and shipped 17 projects in under a month.
Here's the thing... code is just TEXT, written in a specific format that computers can understand. Here's a simple example.
That single line writes "Hello, World!" to the developer console. In a browser, open Developer Tools and choose Console to see it. It does not put text on the page itself.
Humans have different languages (English, Spanish, Japanese), and computers have programming languages. You'll hear these a lot.
So how does code actually do anything? It goes through a lil process.
You (or more likely Claude Code) write the instructions in a programming language.
The computer reads your code and translates it into something it can run.
The computer follows your instructions, like showing text, saving data, or whatever else you asked it to do.
When you visit a website like Google, here's what's happening behind the curtain.
All of that happens in milliseconds, with millions of lines of code working together (kinda wild when you think about it).
Next lesson we're gonna look at how the internet works, the foundation that makes web apps possible...