For most people, learning to code seems a daunting experience, a skill best left to those who have always loved building things online. But not for for Matthew Travers — learning to code was always a goal, and it seemed the simplest way to build his web platform.

The decision coincided with a move to Brussels, after his wife took up a job with the Australia Council for the Arts. Travers saw it as an opportunity to build the startup he’d previously considered, but never had the impetus to give it a go.

“I was moving overseas, so didn’t have the existing networks to reach out to,” says Travers. “That prompted me to tackle more than I otherwise would have.”

Travers describes his working prototype, ServiceRage, as a sentiment analysis tool for customer feedback on different companies’ service. Currently, it uses twitter comments about particular companies, and uses a formula to determine whether they are positive or negative.

There are a number of sites which compare pricing companies such as insurers, banks, telco’s and electricity providers, but it’s often difficult to judge how good a company’s service is, prior to signing a contract.

“With ServiceRage, I decided to focus on industries where it’s hard to make a decision about the sort of service you’re going to get,” says Travers. “For most customers, the might be with an insurer for 15-20 years before finally making a claim.

“Only at that point will they realise what the service is really like.”

Having worked as a digital producer and product manager for companies like Realestate.com.au and News Digital, Travers understood how digital businesses worked, but never had the technical skills required to build anything himself.

Matthew Travers taught himself to code so he could launch his own startup (Image: supplied)

He says it’s much easier to teach yourself now than it ever was in the past, thanks to simpler programming languages, online tutorials and easy-to-use code repositories.

Travers plans to rely on advertising for revenue, but for that to work he’ll need to get plenty of eyeballs. Now that the platform is built, Travers is trying to increase the traffic, and playing around with SEO and other methods of promoting results. He’s exploring how he might be able to use the data he collects to publish reports and provide content elsewhere. That he’s even in a position to think about this, is a result of his efforts in learning to code.

“The actual process of coding is really satisfying — you don’t have to deal with the fuzziness of other professions like marketing, which are dependent upon peoples’ emotions and relationships.”

There are a number of tools Travers has used to learn the basics:

1. Lynda. Offering more than 83,000 videos, Lynda is a subscription based service with tutorials on an incredible range of subjects. Travers used the service to work through the basics of Ruby, Rails, CSS, HTML and Javascript. It costs $25 a month, but it’s well worth it, he says.
2. Railscasts. Railscasts is another video-based learning platform, although is targeted towards more experienced programmers. It’s useful once you’ve got some basics down pat, but need some assistance as you go.
3. StackOverflow. Think Quora for programmers: StackOverflow is a question and answer site for technical problems. Travers says it has been a valuable resource, as many of the questions he had building ServiceRage had already been answered.
4. GitHub. GitHub is an open-source code repository. It’s a library for ‘gems’; packaged pieces of code which performs certain functions. For example, Travers used a piece of code from GitHub to include pagination, breaking results for a particular company into several pages.
5. EngineYard. Travers uses EngineYard to host his site. EngineYard is a cloud-based hosting platform that automates configuration, deployment and management of web applications. It’s simple to use, and doesn’t require the detailed understanding needed in the past to configure servers.

For Travers, learning to code has been a positive experience. He knows it will get to a point where his expertise is no longer sufficient. Travers acknowledges the way the site is built and the way he manages the codebase might not be the most effective.

“No matter how far you get along the continuum of learning, I think it’s worth giving it a go. The only caveat is that you need to be in a situation where timelines aren’t critical — it’s taken me six months to get ServiceRage to launch.”