𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗜 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝟭𝟭, 𝗜 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴. My dad bought me a second-hand computer with a very old processor (and a turbo button!). Because it didn’t come with any software, all I could do was use the code software in QBasic. And now I’m the CEO of a software company; I assume there was an ending to that story :)
Having coding skills has helped me tremendously during my life so far, and that is besides the career influence that it has had. My dad had a tulip farm, so I coded him a simple app to track empty containers.
During that same period, my brother had a pirate radio station, which was tons of fun—being chased by the regulators and getting interviewed by cops. Everything ended well and within the law (more or less). During the night time, we didn’t have any DJs to play music, and I, being the youngest brother, needed to tape 8(!) hours of non-stop music, which was played during the night until the first DJ started.
While I was doing my internship somewhere, I didn’t have too much to do, so I coded a piece of software that played non-stop music. Remember, this was the nineties, so life was different :)
Some say that coding should be taught in primary school. That might help, but there is so much new tooling available, like the Betty Blocks platform. There is no need to code, but all the opportunity to solve your own problems with software that you build yourself.
Solving things and helping people have always been my main drivers of what I do. I like helping people. In my ideal world, everyone can do that. Enabling people to help themselves is the main premise behind Betty Blocks.
In real life, you don’t always have the opportunity to build something from scratch in a green field setup. In a professional environment software already exists, and it’s that software that’s in the way of people optimizing their daily job. Almost every app built on our platform connects and enriches an existing application, creates a modern UI around an older system, or augments existing software to add more features.
That’s why we have our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal): Make All Software Customizable. By anyone.
In my ideal world, everyone can build software, either a new app or customizing the software you or your company already use. To that end, we’re not only making software development more accessible (by everyone!), but we’re also working with existing software vendors to help them add low-code features to our platform.
Have customizability built into the software that you use professionally. We call that Betty Blocks Embedded (https://lnkd.in/eYrTqx2e). Embed cool Betty Blocks features into your platform.
With this step, I’m closer to achieving my personal goal of helping people to help themselves (by building software themselves).