#nationalcodingweek interview with Barnaby

To celebrate National Coding Week 2020 our development team participated in a short interview. First up is company founder and Technical Director, Barnaby!

• 14 September 2020
• By Maria Bell
•  Events

Name: Barnaby Mercer

My role in Mesomorphic: Technical Director

How I got into coding: Mum brought home a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum when I was about 5 or 6. There were no games for it other than the ones I could type in from books and magazines. I had no idea what the code did at the time; I just copied it in, character by character. Later I got an MSX which had a great version of Microsoft Basic built in.

My favourite language: It depends on what I’m trying to do. For many purposes, Ruby is a great language. If I need something more performant, then C# is quite nice. I’ve recently been learning Kotlin as an alternative to Java, and find the syntax much neater.

My dream project: I got into programming to write games, but as I’ve progressed in my career, I realise that it’s less important what I’m writing, and more important that I’m using tools that I enjoy.

If I were to recommend a resource to learn coding, I would recommend: Depending on one’s experience and learning preferences, there are many options. YouTube can be a great place to start. If you prefer to read, there are no shortage of blogs and how-to guides. For practice and an interactive approach, CodeWars is a great place to hone one’s skills, but for starting out perhaps try CodinGame.