iOS Development with Timirah James Software Sessions

Timirah is an iOS developer, developer advocate, founder of the TechniGal LA meetup group, and instructor for O'Reilly and Coursera.

Related Links

@timirahjSwift OptionalsStanford CS193p - Developing Apps for iOSHacking with SwiftRay WenderlichSwiftObjective CXcodeFlutterDart
Music by Crystal Cola.

Transcript

You can help edit this transcript on GitHub.

Jeremy: [00:00:03] Today I'm talking to Tamirah James. She's been an iOS developer for... how many years has it been?

Timirah: [00:00:09] Oh my goodness. Since I first started iOS, I want to say ooh (whispering) oh my gosh seven years.

Jeremy: [00:00:15] Seven years. Where did that time go?

Timirah: [00:00:17] My goodness. Oh yeah. Seven years. Wow.

Jeremy: [00:00:21] I think a lot of people listening have written software before, but maybe not for iOS. So I'm interested to hear what your experience is and how you think people should get into it.

Timirah: [00:00:31] Absolutely. So, yeah, and excuse me, we, we talked about my, before, before we, cut the podcast on, we were talking about how I have this 8:00 AM rasp in my voice (laughs) so you'll have to excuse the rasp. But, yeah, I, like we said, you know, seven years with iOS development. The great thing, and the crazy thing about, you know, my journey in iOS is I really went in with purpose and, intention, right. I went into mobile development knowing, that it was going to be something that was valuable not only into my career, but valuable to, society as a whole right. Valuable to the industry as a whole. So it, it goes all the way back to like, when I first started coding and I was like, I want to say I was 17 years old. and I started to get into web development and, I got bamboozled into getting into a, like a high school, like internship thing, to learn web design. and I loved it and that was my first introduction to coding. And I was like, Oh my goodness.

Like, this is amazing, like web development, web design. And then once I started to think about college and the route that I wanted to go, I was like, okay. Hm. There's so many other avenues. And so many other doors in this industry, like. You know what? I know that I want to pursue computer science but what, what is going to be my path?

So I started thinking about my career pathway immediately. I'm like, okay, going to college then what? And at that time, I think like we were just making the transition from like flip phones. And like the cameras and the, Oh my gosh. If you had the video phone, you call them the video phones, video phones.

And then the transition into like, Oh, now we're at, iPod touches. Now we're at iPhones now or at we're like, okay. Oh, wow. This is like the birth of the smartphone, the birth of the iPhone, and really seeing the transition. The phone being something that's way beyond just a communication device right now it's media, now it's entertainment, now it's education, it's finance, it's, all of these things. I always say like, you can leave your laptop at home, but if you leave your phone, You're like, Oh my gosh like, how am I going to function throughout the day? If I can build something for that, I can make a huge, huge impact so I really went into it with all, like, it was very much, something that I went with all intentions, all intentional purposes.

So I said, you know, after college I'm going to go right into mobile development. I really think that I will make the biggest impact there and build things that will stick with people and people will spend time with, and people enjoy, and will live with users. I fell in love with the idea of the evolution of the phone and mobile development.

So went to college, ended up dropping out in that first year, computer science, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that the university I went to wasn't a, tech school, so to speak, computer science was not one of their pillars. You know, one of their like, Oh, this is something that we're focusing and we have resources and we hav