An Australian is the youngest developer at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) – Yuma Soerianto, 10, has made the long journey from Melbourne, Australia, to be at Apple’s WWDC. Yuma has been one of a handful of people around the world to win a scholarship to attend.
Yuma Soerianto has been building websites since he was six years old, and the reason he says he started it was boring and not-so-complex studies. 🙂
Last year turned his attention to the App Store.
Yuma Soerianto is self taught and began coding using Swift Playgrounds. Swift Playgrounds, the iPad app Apple debuted at last year’s conference, is designed to teach children the fundamentals of coding in an interactive environment. It relies on gaming mechanics and friendly-looking cartoon characters to keep children engaged.
Yuma completed the tutorials in Swift Playgrounds, and knew he wanted to build his own app. He turned to his parents and teachers for further learning, but sensed he knew more about coding than they did. So he enrolled in a free iTunes U Swift coding course, offered by Stanford University. Less than a year after completing the course, Yuma has released five apps on the App Store, including Lets Stack!, Hunger Button, Kid Calculator, Weather Duck and Pocket Poké.
Let’s Stack! is Yuma’s most complex app to date. You play as a construction worker, who just happens to be a duck, building an increasingly narrow tower block.
When asked how long it took to code, Soerianto says “about two months”, before quickly qualifying – “But that’s because I was building it around school work, and I took two weeks off to work on my application for the WWDC scholarship.”
“I actually made an app on the plane!” he says, pulling out an iPhone. He used the 14-hour flight to build a tip calculator for his parents to use during their stay in San Jose. “You put in how much the total is, and then how much of a tip you want to leave. The app also shows you how much the total is in Australian dollars. I had to update it when we got here, because prices here don’t include tax. So now it adds in the tax, too.”
Yuma has started a YouTube channel, Anyone Can Code. The channel has over five hundred subscribers and counting. Yuma says that he started the YouTube channel for kids of his age, but most of his subscribers seem to be adults who watch and comment on his videos.
Yuma met Tim Cook in WWDC and was quite excited to show his apps to him. And Yuma had this to tweet on his way back home from WWDC. “Heading back home tonight! I Learned a lot from #WWDC17 an made lots of friends! Thank you @Apple for giving me the chance to go to WWDC17 !”
Source: SMH