The Code Revolution

Shortcuts

• Address
• Telephone
• Alerts
• Claim ownership or report listing

• 

  Want your business to be the top-listed Computer & Electronics Service in Riverview?

About

I have been in the IT industry for over 15 years. I have been developing software (i.e. coding) for the better part of that (almost 12 years). I started as a software develop for the US Navy, moved on to work for the largest law firm in the Southeast and finally for one of the largest financial services firm in the US here in the Tampa Bay area. This has given me a lot of opportunity to develop enterprise level software, work with incredibly smart people as well as manage the software development process (including projects, people and budgets). But besides writing code one of my favorite activities is mentoring. There is something genuinely rewarding supporting someone that is learning and seeing them grow. Over the course of the last few years in the corporate world I have had the opportunity to manage a team and through this experience I have come to learn a lot about myself. Two of these things are that I love playing with technology and I love helping others learn and grow.

But what struck me as awkward is that I had no idea how to teach my two boys (age 7 and almost 10) how to code. When I first saw Scratch I thought “Wow! That’s kinda cool…” but I didn’t really give it much attention. Once I started spending some time in these technologies and exploring what’s available for kids I realized there was a problem. If it’s difficult for a professional software developer to teach kids to code, it must be impossible for anyone else. This is a big reason why I started the Code Revolution. I want to empower kids, to give them a skillset that they can use for work or for fun. In a world where technology is ubiquitous it’s almost a necessity for kids to understand how computers operate at a deeper level. And to compete with countries like India and China we have to have more coders. The US Burea of Labor Statistics forecasts software developer jobs to grow at 24% from now until 2026, much faster than the average. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm. And the current median salary is over $100,000 annually and nearly $50 / hour!!! As a hiring manager in the software field I understand first hand how difficult it is to hire local or even domestic candidates. I’m not talking about quality. I just mean it’s often a challenge to get people to apply. As such we resort to offshore because this is the only way to fill a need (besides being inexpensive it’s really often the only available labor today). But having skilled resources on-site is really irreplaceable. And given the statistics above and the *median* salary, imagine what you can do as a successful, capable and intelligent software developer. Often what I see today is that exceptional talent can live anywhere. These types of resources are in such demand that they can work remote globally.

What tools do we use in the Code Revolution? Just like in the real world I like to be flexible. I don’t want to pin myself to one tech stack. But here at the Code Revolution we have developed a nice progression with plans for the future. First, kids start with Blockly (developed by Google) and use this to power a robot to solve puzzles like run through a maze, draw or clean up blocks. This gets us talking about code, structure and order. Next kids can move to Scratch which is very similar to Blockly but allows kids to build simple games on the computer and enjoy their code by playing. As they develop some confidence in Scratch and start to understand the components of a program we move on to Python and Pygame. This is where the magic really starts to happen. Python is a world class and enterprise level programming language. This is where the rubber hits the road the we can really start to develop some real world skills. There are future plans to start developing games in Unity. Unity is the premier gaming engine today. Fortunately for me it is a Microsoft product and the code engine is C#. I have been developing C# applications for the bulk of my experience. So I’m extremely excited to start developing applications in Microsoft’s Unity.