“When I started school, I had so much free time, and I wanted to do something else other than just watching the television and playing games,” Yuma Soerianto shared about how his inspiration for coding came about.
The 10-year-old is the genius behind trending games such as the Let’s Stack and Let’s Stack AR!. Yuma leapt to the fame as the youngest developer at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in 2017 (WWDC17), where he was singled out by Apple‘s CEO. Tim Cook was floored that Yuma had developed an app to help his parents work out the price for goods and souvenirs by adding the local sales tax and calculating the currency conversion. To top things off he did it all while on the flight from Melbourne to San Francisco.
The young whiz was recently invited to pop by Apple’s flagship store in Singapore as a guest coding instructor while he was here on a holiday with his parents.
The coding prodigy took a year to master the basics, and another half a year to learn a few programming languages and although he uses swift coding to develop the applications, he is also no stranger to languages such as HTML and Javascript, having previously developed websites before. Currently, he runs his own YouTube channel, Anyone can Code, where he posts engaging tutorials on coding knowledge.
As the WWDC17 scholarship winner jokingly shared about how his friends would ask him to make apps of their interests, we asked if he would consider himself to be an expert. He humbly replied, “I’m a normal kid, just like everyone else, except I just make apps and I just have a passion for coding.”
For a ten-year-old, Soerianto has a curiously firm grasp on what it takes to make an app successful. He affords that while there are many aspects to it, an application is successful when it is useful, basic, and responsive. “It should not take many taps to be able to do just one action, neither should it take too long to react when one taps on something’, he says.
When asked about one application he would personally wish to create, Soerianto responded that he would develop one to take care of the house so “I can just sit back and relax”. That’s something most of us can get on board with, I’m sure.
For anyone aspiring to develop their own apps, Yuma advises you to be curious in order to spark innovative applications, and to plan ahead. “Sketching out your applications or projects before you make them makes coding a lot easier if you know what you’re doing,” he explained.
