I certainly hope that everybody is enjoying our bi-weekly teen interviews. We had a little incident with our last interview and had to take it down, but I feel like this one is so awesome it’ll make up for it!
Marcel’s Workspace
Marcel is a 17 year old from Germany, and says he’s been coding for six or seven years.
How did you first begin coding?
I started coding six or seven years ago with HTML and CSS but I became bored very quickly. Then I started with Visual Basic, which wasn’t satisfying. After that, I finally started to learn Objective-C because I was fascinated with how apps are made, since I got my first iPod touch in 2009. I still love it and am fascinated.
Being 17, you’re the oldest teen developer we’ve interviewed so far. What are your plans for the future? Will you be going to school to study Computer Sciences, or will you take a different path?
Good question but to be honest, I don’t have any concrete plans for the future. I’m interested in Law, Computer Science and Politics but I can’t decide on what I want to study. Luckily, I still got three years remaining until I have to decide that. (Yay!)
What kinds of apps do you develop and why? Do you have any of your own or do you prefer freelancing and doing work for others?
I prefer to work on my own apps because I am more motivated, I can try out new things and I can be more creative but I also like to do freelance work because of the collaboration and the financial perspective. I’m actually working on a personal project of mine right now, and will be releasing some more details later next month.
What were your impressions of WWDC 2014? Was there anything unexpected or that you’re looking forward to that was announced?
They announced some of the best stuff in years. Extensions, widgets, predictive keyboard, new iTunes Connect and many, many other things. I still haven’t watched all WWDC sessions and haven’t played with all new APIs, simply because there’s such a huge amount of new stuff. To make it short: they killed it this year.
Is there anything that wasn’t announced, but you would like to see?
I was hoping for Objective-C 3.0 but they announced Swift. Well, and I was hoping for an Apple TV SDK but they didn’t announce it (again). Lets hope that we will finally get it with the next update of the Apple TV.
Anything else you’d like to say?
Stop talking, start learning! Programming is not just a skill, it is also a mindset that will change they way you think. You will start thinking about how something is probably made and how to break it.
Kind and inspirational words from Marcel this week. If you would like to connect with him, he’s @CocoaMarcel on Twitter.
As always, feel free to contact Kaleb if you’d like to be featured. Posts come out Thursday mornings every two weeks.