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!