In honor of code.org’s Computer Science Education Week 2013 (have you seen their cool “One Hour of Code” video?), and their announcement of a partnership with Chicago Public Schools, we asked some of the folks in our iOS developer community what it takes to be a great coder.
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Brandon Passley is a coder and CEO of Mobile Makers Academy, which teaches beginners how to build apps for the iPhone and iPad (note: it does take more than an hour to learn). Yet when he was in high school, he thought a coder was an a-social creature who lurked in the dark recesses of a cube farm typing endless lines of inscrutable text. Now he knows that impression is still prevalent but entirely wrong.
“To be a great coder, you actually need social skills. Sure, there is a component of the job that requires focused attention in front of your computer monitor, but coding is inherently a group effort. It’s a complicated business, and everyone involved needs to be able to communicate effectively about what they want the code to do, or it will all crash and burn.”
Eddie Kang completed the iOS bootcamp in August 2013 and then immediately started in the MBA program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He said, “The desire to fix problems is necessary to be a coder, but I can’t emphasize how much character is needed, too. For career switchers, it takes persistence, the ability to consistently accept failure and work through it, the humility to ask for help all the time, and the commitment to not make the same mistake twice.”
Alex Choi, an August 2013 grad, is a freelance iOS developer in New York. Alex said a great developer needs a “meta awareness of what problems should be solved, not just how to solve them.” Curiosity is important, he says, but also rigor. “You need to develop techniques to manage complexity—offloading from mental memory to notes or an app architecture” is critical to keeping the code organized.
It definitely does not take a PhD to be a coder, but it happens that one 2013 graduate who's a software engineer in Los Angeles, also holds a doctorate in biomedical sciences, so we like to think he knows something. He boiled it down to “The three Ps: Persistence, Patience and Practice.”
These are important considerations for any future coder. But if you think about it, to be a great coder, there’s only one quality you need to start with: You need to be willing to work hard. Everything else? You can learn it.
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