This is a rather brief resume of a guy who has been flirting with programming practically all his life but has never had the confidence to give it a real try. Keep reading and I think you might find that we may have a lot of things in common.

I bought my first computer with my own money at the age of 9. Pocket money, birthday gifts, Christmas carolling, everything went in! This was the pre-Windows era so all commands had to be typed. I quickly got accustomed to the tool but reading at that tender age the technical manual that came with the newly acquired PC proved far too difficult for a boy without a mentor or access to the Internet.

A few years later, I had the immense opportunity to take two years of computer classes in highschool. This is where I discovered the LOGO language and learned how to move that sexy turtle. Once again, this is where my programming aspirations ended.

Then I entered university. I started learning HTML and CSS and then discovered acoustics and Praat. The idea of analysing sound seemed thrilling but, once again, I had other things to learn, assignments to prepare, a life to live, so delving into Praat programming was delayed.

Next year, big change in my life: I moved to Paris thanks to the Erasmus exchange program as a fourth-year undergraduate student. I had a lot of free time so I dove into programming books with an unquenchable thirst. I was looking for the right programming language to learn so I started going through one beginner’s manual after the other and learned the basics of Java, Javascript, Python, C, Visual Basic… I even installed Linux! This is how invested I was. Frustration settled in after a few months: too many languages, too many project ideas, too much to learn. I did not have a specific project upon which to work after finishing the first 10-15 chapters of each manual. I then understood that learning for the sake of learning did not work for me.

A year later, I entered a Master’s in Phonetics program and started working on audio signal. For the following 9 years, I prepared Praat scripts for me and my friends in order to make long, repetitive manual tasks as error- and pain-free as possible. I had too many ideas for research projects but I always felt limited by my unclear lack of vision. I flirted with Python on and off but programming does not rime with procrastination.

After I stopped research, I continued using Praat to achieve minor daily tasks: do statistics for my sports club, create converters for personal use, etc. I was very proficient in Praat programming but that was not enough for setting up bigger projects since I was too afraid to dive into a full-fledged programming language. Too many new concepts, too much work, no clear vision of where I wanted to go.

This book is for people like me: computer users that have been yearning to get their hands dirty but have not had the courage, the confidence or the discipline to really put the effort. Users that have been flirting but have not decided to tie the knot. Users that might have been creating tiny scripts to solve everyday problems and automate minor daily tasks but have been feeling restrained, unable to work on bigger projects with a potentially bigger impact. I have taught computers for many years in various universities around Paris and understand the frustration that technology can bring about and am quite sure I have written a tool that can ease your anguish.

P.S. Writing this book gave me a real confidence booster and I finally decided to go into Kotlin and start writing Android apps!