A few months ago I met Karlie Kloss, now for those of you who don’t know who she is, she is a developer. Yes she use to be a Victoria Secret model, but now she is a developer. She runs a coding camp called “Kode With Klossy“. Now why is this important? Why is meeting her important? Well her work is quite important, she teaches young girls skills in coding. Why is this important to me? Well not to get too political but the reason why this hit me is because around the world a lot of countries are seeing that coding is just as important as every other subject in school. When I saw the news that Betsy DeVos wanted to make MASSIVE CUTS to education, what would be the first to go? Electives and coding classes are usually electives. Also computers are expensive, and some schools might see cutting these classes as a way to save money.

America First???

When I saw this article all those years ago about Estonia making coding part of the curriculum I cheered. I was hoping America would follow suit. Well for a time we were pushing forward. But nowadays I am seeing things that are starting to make me worry. When you cut school budgets and take away education you strip away the skills that future generations will need to excel and actually be number 1. These type of cuts could lead to America losing a big chunk of their coders. Which will move our future developers down a few notches on the ladder of skilled developers among the world.

Now with the tech being global, you are not competing with just people in the same country but with other developers among the rest of the world. What I think a lot of people fail to realize, is that many times companies will hire remote. Thus, you are competing with the world for a position. Gone are the days of looking in the paper or seeing a hiring sign. I actually applied for positions in France, let that sink in. I can hire to different positions across the world and work remote. If I can do it, what is stopping the other millions of coders out there from doing it.

let codeCamps = True;

Code camps such as Girls Who Code, Microsoft’s YouthSpark, or Apple’s Codecamps  are probably going to become more important than ever because in the next few years I can see these education cuts hurting America’s tech industry more and more. And if we want to stay ahead of the world and innovation we will need to put more money into development. I said a while back that I thought that making coding part of the school program should become the new norm. It helps with problem solving, creativity and logistical thinking, not to mention teamwork, and asking questions. Teamwork is probably one of the biggest things that coding camps can teach because projects are TEAM effort. Nowadays, you are not just shoehorned into a cubical and told “code this”.

Also you learn how to give and take constructive criticism because developing skills such as communication is important. You will learn about this during code reviews. I know developers are very overprotective of their code but I think with code camps they learn about how sharing knowledge helps each other.

In Closing…

With meeting Karlie, I really hope she continues on teaching her code camps, she was quite a inspiration in meeting her and she is very down to earth and definitely from the short time I talked to her, a very solid inspirational leader. I think in the coming years they will be the reason why coders from America will always be wanted and keep us as the number 1 in the world of tech and innovation. To stay ahead of the rest of the world we have to keep investing in education, not cutting it. So if you are not able to send your children to a code camp, give them an iPad with Swift Playgrounds or let them get on CodeCadamy  and just start learning.

 

see you space cowboy…

 

Photos By:
Steven Thompson

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