Pete Argent is passionate about programming and the problems it can solve. He believes that once a person knows how to code they can build any app that can change the world.
As the Academic Director of the Coder Factory Academy, and has spent the last three years teaching coding to children and adults through workshops and courses — and now he has teamed up with ASUS.
“It is very rewarding to help people understand coding, because you can see the students become excited once they figure out how it all works,” explained Pete. “They can now see that they can build anything they want and make a great life for themselves.”
Argent says he sees his ambassadorship with ASUS to be an opportunity to reach out to more of the community and encourage more people to empower themselves by learning to code.
“Our world is experiencing spectacular technological advancement at an ever increasing pace and I don’t want Australians to be left behind,” said Pete. “We need to invest more in technology education and I’m hoping this platform will allow me to convey that message.”
Pete is also intent on breaking stereotypes within the IT and coding community by encouraging more females to try coding. Through the Coder Factory Academy he is teaching Bankstown Girls High School students how to code and he will be rolling this program out to more schools this year.
Later in 2016 Pete will be organising a virtual Hackathon called Hack the Media. This event will bring people together to explore new ideas to reach bigger audiences via vlogging, podcasting, live streaming and citizen journalism.
If you’re interested in learning how to code the Coder Factory Academy is a great place to start. They offer a number of different options for all levels including coding bootcamps and short courses, to workshops for businesses and corporates and technology education for schools.
If you’re keen to test the waters online there are many free tutorials and books to help learn. Pete suggests starting with web development like HTML, CSS and a web application development framework like Ruby on Rails.