Tech Talent South (TTS) is a program that was recently launched here in Raleigh to address the problem of more people trying to enter the tech industry and become familiar with today’s universal language, coding. They provide courses in various platforms and languages including web development, Ruby on Rails, and my personal favorite, iOS (more specifically, building iOS apps with Swift). TTS has been a program that Lithios has been hearing more and more about and have heard great reviews from our peers.

So, imagine our surprise and excitement when we got a call from the local TTS director asking if we could teach the iOS course! After discussing with the team and allocating the necessary time for the lessons, we happily obliged! Lithios is now teaching the iOS TSS course for the next 6 weeks.

The iOS Development course will consist of 6 grueling, hard-working, blood, sweat, and tear filling weeks of non-stop Swift programming. Ok, not really, but I gotta try to put on a tough face for the students, right?? Throughout the 6 week, twice a week, 3 hour session lessons, the students will be able to produce a real, production-ready application deployed to their phones. We started this past week teaching the fundamentals of the Swift language syntax including variable types, conditionals, loops, and Swift-specific operators (such as optionals and optional binding). This next week will include more details data types such as enums and structs, and following that, the beautiful object oriented classes…that’s when the real fun begins!

While teaching iOS is not necessarily part of Lithios’ mission or business plan, we feel that this is a great opportunity for us. It pushes us slightly outside of our comfort zone (an area I like to frequent), brings us back to the basics and allows us to review simple and fundamental concepts, and gives us an opportunity to give back to the community that we love and had provided so much for us.