National Coding Week 2020 — Experts Discuss the Importance of Coding

As businesses continue to work through issues and navigate the nuances of a distributed workforce, National Coding Week is here to remind us of the importance of coding skills across industries. Running from September 14, 2020, to September 18, 2020, the week-long event raises awareness about the crucial role of development teams and promotes the importance of education in the field. 

Over the past six months, development teams have continued to prove their critical role throughout the world of technology, with coding skills seeping into job descriptions across various industries. As businesses continue to see the value of coding, it’s important to ensure that organizations realize the full potential of development teams and their abilities to handle current and future crises. 

In celebration of National Coding Week, three tech industry leaders share their thoughts on the importance of coding for today’s businesses.

Coding Has Become the Language of Business — Jeff Keyes, VP of Products, PlutoraOpens a new window

“If you didn’t realize how much businesses relied on software before the coronavirus pandemic started, you know now. With so many people working remotely, organizations are more dependent than ever on software that keeps the team on the same page and keeps the business operating smoothly. However, none of that can be accomplished without skilled development teams that are supported by strong and fluent coders. Just like a house needs a sturdy foundation upon which to build, an application also needs a solid foundation of well-written code from developers. Every company–from a fresh-faced startup to a seasoned enterprise–must have a talented team of code writers who can meet the demands of the rapidly-evolving software industry and do so quickly and at scale. Coding has become the language of business, and organizations must be fluent in order to achieve success.”

DevOps Has Transformed the Way IT Practitioners Look at Coding — Tony Goulding, Cybersecurity Evangelist, CentrifyOpens a new window  

“DevOps has completely transformed the way IT practitioners look at coding and software development. As companies adopt best practices for DevOps and incorporate new technologies, tools, and methodologies, incorporating privileged access management (PAM) to protect organizations from a cyberattack becomes increasingly complex.

Traditional methods of securing developer environments involve manual interventions and restrictive controls that can slow down the development and operations teams. Organizations now also have a rapidly-increasing amount of non-human identities to manage, such as applications, virtual machines, services, and workloads running in the cloud. As a result, DevOps has shied away from keeping PAM in their environment because it proved too slow and complex to deploy and manage. However, the reality is that each new identity created represents a potential attack surface, even if short-lived. This National Coding Week, it is important for organizations to look past legacy PAM methods and move to more modern methods of preventing cyberattacks from impacting their software development. Luckily, PAM solutions that support more modern application-to-application password management (AAPM) approaches can help DevOps teams secure privileged identities – both human and non-human. AAPM methods, such as secure shell (SSH) keys, ephemeral tokens, and Delegated Machine Credentials, can seamlessly incorporate PAM into the DevOps pipeline, ensuring secure access that improves an organization’s security posture and agility while still helping developers meet their time-based goals.”

Coders Have Become an Essential Part of Every Business —  Henry Jewkes, Staff Software Engineer, SplitOpens a new window

“The past year has clearly demonstrated the value of digital transformation that coders have brought to our world. At a time where we are all reducing our time in public spaces, code enables and empowers our commerce, our remote work, and our continued relationships with those important to us.

National Coding Week provides a wonderful opportunity to show appreciation to all those that make this possible. Coders have become an essential part of every business, advancing and maintaining websites, applications, and technical projects for customers and companies as a whole. Now more than ever, it is important to encourage and support those joining the field, and to encourage greater diversity in this increasingly distributed world.

Coding has become critical for businesses in various industries. Today, technology already handles several repetitive tasks, a trend that will only grow with further developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. As the digital age grows, organizations should realize the importance of coding skills and educate themselves to work with more complex codes.”