Last Wednesday we held our first CodeMaker course open to the public in the lovely board room of Mother. We had a great crowd of attendees with very diverse backgrounds. Some worked in technology companies such as Nokia and Twilio, others at creative agencies like Mother and Facegroup. We even had a guy from BRE the big building consultancy.
All of them were united in the desire to understand how digital products work better and to many even had done a bit of coding in HTML in the past. So in the morning our coach Peter Brownell took them through the history of computing starting of with the invention of the Abacus in 2400 BC, introducing them to binary as the basis of modern computing. Then we moved onto modern programming languages such as Python and Ruby, explained the architecture of web and mobile apps and after this geeky warm up dived into HTML and CSS by hacking some of our favorite websites using the nifty X-ray Googles and some other online tools to explain CSS. In between these modules Peter, who has been software developer for almost 20 years gave very valuable insight into how to plan web projects using agile principles.
Following a yummy lunch downstairs at Motherwe then proceeded to introduce Javascript and started tinkering with the Twitter API, Google Maps API and Google Fusion tables, which we all combined in a single, simple app. It was quite an exhausting day, but participants left with the feeling that they now have a much better vocabulary to communicated with developers, a better understanding of the complexity of building software and many said they now wanted to get deeper into coding. So all in all we felt we had delivered a good course that does what it promises, but also already started thinking about how we could provide follow up courses from teaching Ruby to diving into ever expanding world of social API’s, agile planning…….
We are also really happy that there seems to be quite a demand for CodeMaker. The next one on then 18th is already fully booked and places for the 25th are filling up. We will announce new dates shortly. You can register your interest at the bottom of this page.