Decoded Says Learn Code in a Day
Decoded is helping to close the language gap between average folks and their computers.
(Photo: courtesy Decoded)
The ability to make technology palatable to average folks is a skill much in demand — yet still not as emphasized as it should be. It’s the idea behind Decoded, a very cool company that teaches citizens how to code — at least a little bit — in just one day. Based in London, with offices in Australia, Singapore and New York, Decoded’s website touts seminars in everything from hacking to building a blockchain app to unpacking VR experiences.
Tapping into companies that range from boutique to enterprise, Decoded has matriculated thousands of students at hundreds of firms around the world, instructing everyone from CEOs to working Joes. The ideas isn’t t turn out little Linus Torvalds, but rather to make people comfortable with the idea of code, and casually conversant. The company, founded in 2011 by by Kathryn Parsons, Steve Henry, Richard Peters and Alasdair Blackwell, has received a lot of attention due to the fact that its staff is largely women.
“Ms. Parsons had been inspired by a conversation over a whisky with a friend in advertising. Both wanted to understand how websites are built, yet neither felt they had time to learn,” according to the Telegraph. “The company’s founders have hit on the technology world’s biggest flaw: a disconnection between the ‘specialist programmers’ who can code and the management – those who commission them but can’t understand the language.”
That pretty much sums up why I learned coding. Having participated in an enterprise website launch in the early aughts (or at least what passed for enterprise in the early aughts), and a relaunch at that same company about three years later, I emerged from the experience frustrated that when we asked for something to be done a certain way, we were either told why it couldn’t be, or why it was going to cost a lot of extra money, or throw us off schedule. I — and every other executive on our team — had no idea had to evaluate the circumstances surrounding the conclusions with which were were being presented.
When I left to to join a smaller company it was largely so I could roll up my sleeves and play in the digital sandbox. “Teaching coding was hobby that became an obsession that took over my life,” Parsons told Australian Vogue recently. Coding is fun. It’s easy to see how that could happen.