Month: December 2020

Diversity in Swift

Just recently, the Swift team announced a new effort to promote diversity in Swift.

As someone who tries to make sure people who want to learn how to code get the best introduction they can, I love this effort. We, as a software engineering community in general, can always use more voices and perspectives.

They have a great group of inspirational folks on the working group helping showcase diversity and bring aspects of coding to light that you might not otherwise consider.

Swan’s Quest and Accessibility

A great example of this is the Swan’s Quest session at the Worldwide Developer Conference this year: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc20/10681.

In that session they introduced us to a puzzle we solved by implementing accessibility for those folks who use the screen reader technology built into their iPads. We covered this session during our Coding at Home series.

It’s a nice reminder to us that we’re building software for more than just ourselves; there’s a whole raft of people out there who might benefit from the code we write.

Diversity in Thought

The other aspect I love about this effort is that it makes us aware of our different backgrounds and how much that can contribute to really interesting problems and solutions.

Where you’re coming from is not 100% the same as anyone else, so you always have something to contribute to the conversation… and can always learn from someone else’s experience.

This includes the great groups like Women in Swift and Black in Swift, but also other diverse voices.

Heck, I’m personally not super diverse, myself, but as a guy with an English degree in an engineering field I bring another perspective to the party (it’s not always useful, but I can tell you a story, anyway 😊).

Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with didn’t study computer science at university or college, but were art history majors, or geology Ph.Ds, or didn’t even go to university.

So I can’t wait to welcome you to our coding sessions, no matter your background, race, gender, or any other variation you can throw at us!

EU Code Week 2020: That’s a Wrap!

It has been a wild and woolly ride, but you can now watch all TEN days of A Quick Start to Code with Swift follow-along sessions!

Steve and I recorded the last few extra days and posted them a little earlier.

Follow-Along Coding Sessions

If you’re just coming to the party, the sessions run around 40 minutes or so and are designed to fit into a classroom period.

We wrote up some instructions and tips for holding a code-along session in your own classroom. Or maybe you want to trial this on your own kids at home. Well, we have instructions for running these sessions at home, too!

Structure

The extra sessions follow the same formula as the first five. We start off with a brief intro to the day’s topic. Then we show you a very cool ‘unplugged’ activity where we exercise the concepts for that day’s lesson. Once we’ve gotten everyone up out of their seats and moving, we gather back around the iPads and Swift Playgrounds for some coding.

On some days we had special guests, which always added an extra bit of excitement to the sessions, and I can’t thank the schools from Scotland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Ireland enough for joining us!

Recap

You can view the entire series of videos on their own here: https://www.thecodehub.ie/eu-code-week-2020/playlist.html

And you can always prepare for each class by referring to our handy site, which contains added context, descriptions of what you need for the unplugged portion, and things you can do to challenge students who are blazing ahead.

I really had a blast coding along with you for ten days. Hopefully this has ignited a little spark for you. Coding is just another way of expressing ourselves, and we found an number of ways of doing that in these ten days. If you keep going, keep practicing, you’ll find all sorts of new ways to solve problems. And then who knows where it can take you?

The Ten

These are the ten sessions, for easy clicking: