Teen Developers – Sergen Gönenç

Woo! Happy one year anniversary of our teen developers series! We have an anniversary post here, along with another interview for the day! Enjoy your 14th of August, everyone!

Could you start by telling me a little about yourself?

Hello! I am a 12 years young iOS Developer and Designer from Turkey. I started programming when I was 10 years old and started developing iOS when I was 11. I have built 4 apps and won a hackathon award since then, but only one of them is in the App Store as of now.

You’ve been to three hackathons. Which was your favourite? Why?

The first hackathon that I attended was the best, I think. Not because that I had won an award there, but because I had met and talked with other software developers there. I really enjoyed that, mostly because we could understand each other while talking in “software-ish” without needing to translate. Besides that, I also made some lasting connections with the developers I met there.

I find the developer community there, and the fun of making new things in hackathons the most attractive thing about attending them. (A developer will know, we sometimes need to talk with people that fully understand when we talk about dev stuff without explaining)

The biggest struggle was squashing the lots of bugs that came with every new feature added and adding the “draw routes” feature, aside from Apple not approving it. I mean, No location data: bug. No internet: another bug. Routes failing to draw in extraordinarily long routes: bug. Crashing in iOS 8 because of the new permissions system: bug… and goes so on. You add that new feature in a couple of minutes, but it does take a really long time to make it rock-solid, to make it behave in every possible condition.

 think Apple is declining it because of its sheer yet feature-packed simplicity, ironically which Apple really values. There is only one screen, it being the main Google Maps screen with a search bar on the top, where you can search places or enter coordinates to show the place or draw a route. I thought of adding another screen, the settings/about menu to change the map type and show credits, and currently I’m adding that. No, I will never abandon this project. It took a long time to make it, a very long time to retry and retry on every reject, and I will never give up because it enriches my life and I want it to enrich other people’s lives by making it easier to find and go to places too.

I think teen developers and coding in Turkey should be promoted, more valued and there should be opportunities provided by the government here, like in the UK or US, since teen devs are so scarce here (I think there are no more than 20 in the entire Turkey).