One of our attendees at the last CodeMaker course Jess Owens just posted a well written review of the day course. Jess works at the creative research agency ‘Face’ in London and called the review “Why Market Researchers Should Learn to Code”, because as she writes:
‘The dirty little secret is, how far does the industry really understand the technological ground it walks upon? Research firms mostly hire people with degrees in psychology, social sciences and humanities. Don’t get me wrong, these are great subjects and give us a lot of insight into human behaviour and culture. Problem is, it leaves us only observers of the technological world – not hackers and makers.
As a result, innovation in the research industry is not keeping up with the technology’
Needless to say this is why we designed the course. Whether you work in what’s called a tech company, or a creative, or research agency (or in media) we are all using digital technology day in and out. But many of us rely entirely on some rather haphazardly acquired knowledge about how web and mobile apps work, what an API is etc and therefore make often poor decisions when it comes to developing and commissioning digital projects and briefs.
Jess adds that
“(…) by mid-afternoon we were doing far more than we’d ever expected – mashing up Google Maps data with real-time geolocated Twitter information and public datasets. It was awesome.
A course like this won’t make anybody a fully-fledged programmer in a day – instructor Peter Brownell is great but he’s not a magician. But it will leave you knowing much more about how web technologies work, and collaborating better with developers on social data projects in future. That’s worth the entry price alone.
But more than that, this course left me excited. I’ve been friends with programmers for years, but somehow coding has never seemed like something I could really do – it was just too big a body of knowledge to learn. But this course changed that: it showed me how to start. Best of all, it gave us all the tools – JQuery examples, JSFiddle to play with the code live, and geodata via Google Fusion Tables – to go away and keep playing, and experimenting, and learning.”
Thanks so much Jess. We are certainly up for helping more people to look underneath the ‘digital bonnet’ and to transform them from ‘CodeBreakers’ to ‘CodeMakers’.