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Walked into a Best Buy in Reno to kill 20 minutes and watched a 60 year old man learn to code on a display laptop
I was killing time in the Reno Best Buy on South Virginia last month waiting for my wife to finish up at the mall, and I parked myself near the laptop display like I always do. This older guy in a denim jacket sat down next to me and started pecking away at a free online course, I think it was one of those freeCodeCamp pages, and he was stuck on a basic HTML lesson where you have to close a tag. He kept typing the same line over and over and muttering to himself, and I could tell he was about two seconds from walking out. I leaned over and pointed at the little slash he was missing, and he just stared at the screen for a second and went 'oh, that's it?' We ended up talking for like 25 minutes and he told me he retired from driving a truck for 30 years and wanted to build a site for his grandkid's soccer team. What got me is how the whole thing is set up now, where you can just sit at a display model with no account and no money and start learning, when I first tried this stuff back in 2016 I had to buy a $40 book. He wrote the fix down on a receipt in his pocket, which honestly is a better system than most note apps I've tried. Has anyone else had a moment like that where you helped a total stranger with the basics and it made you rethink how you learned?
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