I was recently playing Twilio Quest over on my Twitch channel. Twilio Quest is a coding game where you can learn to program Python, JavaScript, PHP, and more. There's a few modules on open source, as well as how to use the Twilio API.

As I've been learning to code various languages, I've released one very important lesson. Coding is as much about recognising spelling errors, semi-colons, and letter casing as it is about the language itself. Call it the syntax if you will. One small comma out of place can mean the difference between your website loading blank, or working completely. Check out my Vue JS stream for a classic example of this in action. But the better example is the clip above where I was doing Twilio Quest.

Syntax is highly important

In this short snippet, I had spent over an hour trying to fix this JavaScript code. I was coding it live on stream and many senior developers had looked over the code and couldn't find what was wrong either. 30 devs, lots of experience, and no one could figure it out. Until someone said... "ummm, I think you have a lower case 'l' when it should be upper case 'L'". I was like "ahhh okay"; thinking that totally can't be a thing.

But it totally was a thing. Changing one tiny little piece of syntax was the difference between my code working, and it totally breaking. There's been lots of examples of this over on my live streams. A missing semi colon, a rogue comma, or simply a spelling mistake. I will probably never get used to it, but the one thing I do love... is working it all out.

I was so happy when the code (after an hour of trying) finally worked. At this point I felt like a real developer! It's the small things in life right? If you want to watch the full Twilio Quest stream check it out. You can play Twilio Quest for yourself too and learn the ways of the Pythonic Temple, or be a JavaScript boss. And if you want to see the full code, check out my GitHub repo.

Oh and if you're wondering why I was wearing a unicorn onesie, it's because we raised over $2000 USD for the kids of St Jude throughout their charity campaign. So I was stuck being a coding unicorn for about a whole month.