Everyone Will Code
Last week at work we took most of our office through the hour of code. It was awesome to see our team members learning how a function worked. They were even able to create some pretty cool games. It made me think about when my children will learn about coding. And how they will use it in their everyday lives.
Coding or the knowledge of coding will be a requirement in the future.
I haven't worked in a non-technical office in about ten years. Today I realized the massive impact a coder can have on your team. On my project we've been talking about transparency and how we can provide the public a better view into what we are doing. One of the things we've come up with is a public facing dashboard for our projects. The dashboard would highlight projects we are working on, grants we've funded, and links to code we've created. So following my own advice on how to design a project, I decided to toss together a prototype. No photoshop designs, just working right in the browser with the code. In about four hours I had the basic flow of the app mocked up and working. Enough functionality to get it over to the other departments for their feedback.
This experience got me thinking about the standard process in most project offices. For this type of coding project, we would have to put together a scope of work and issue an RFP. After a month of receiving proposals from local vendors, we would get a bid committee together to review the proposals. Once we have that vendor, then we would need to explain our needs, and they would take us through their design and development process. In total, the simple app I put together would have taken well over two months of work and used a ton of resources. The amount of time and money saved to my project from my afternoon of work is in the tens of thousands of dollars.
This will be the way of the future. Our children will be able to write code as well as we create excel spreadsheets today. Coding, or an understanding of code, will become a basic job need for all levels of development work.
So what are you waiting for? Start here, learn some basics.