We are welcoming Surya Rose to talk about "Six to Sixteen: A Child's Programming Journey" at FFConf 2025.

We wanted to also thank Surya for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know him a little bit more before 14th November.

About Surya and their talk

• Title: Six to Sixteen: A Child's Programming Journey
• About the talk: Learning to code is not easy. It takes a lot of time and practise to become a good developer, especially with the hundreds of different technologies that exist, it's often hard to know where to start. In this talk, I share my experience as a programmer, starting from when I first learned to code at the age of six.
• Surya's origin story: When I was six years old, I asked my dad to teach me to code. For some reason it stuck, and ten years later here I am giving a talk about it.

The warm up questions

If six-year-old you could see you now, what would they be most impressed by - and what would they be confused about?

They would probably be most impressed by the fact that I'm giving this talk. Talking at FFConf has always been something I've dreamed about - not at 6, but a couple years later - but I never thought it would actually happen.

One thing I think they would be confused about is that I don't really make games. I think every kid dreams to create video games one day - I certainly did - and that's also how I started programming, but game development is never an area I got that into.

What's the most "six-year-old logic" programming decision you ever made - and did it accidentally work?

For my first project I had my dad's supervision so he was always there to help me find an adequate solution to any problem I had.

I do remember later, when tasked to write a FizzBuzz program, instead of writing a "for" or "while" loop, I just wrote 100 console.log statements and hardcoded each of them with the correct value.

About the work and the talk

You started coding at six - what kind of things were you making back then? Any early creations you’re secretly proud of (or embarrassed by)?

I started off making games. My first ever project was a copy of a game I liked playing at the time, but modified to my imagination. I'm still quite proud of it, although I can't say how much of the code I fully understood.

There's also something charming about looking back on what I made 10 odd years ago, and I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed about.

Many adults feel overwhelmed when starting to code - what advice would you give to someone learning to code now for the first time?

Make what you want to make. Coding can be an attractive job because it's extremely prevalent in modern society, and because of this it's often tempting to optimise and learn the most popular or high-paying framework or language at the time.

In my experience, the best way to learn something is to enjoy and to explore it at will, not taking any pre-defined path. That way you enjoy the process and will probably learn better and faster than by taking a course which is not for you.

Once you know the basics of any language or framework, learning a new one is pretty easy in most cases - you usually just need to learn the new syntax and names of everything.

A solid foundation built upon what you love doing goes a long way.

Looking forward, are there any areas of tech you’re excited to dive into next, or ones you think kids learning today should explore?

I'm not personally excited about any specific piece of tech. I usually don't plan ahead what I'm going to try next, I just play with things as inspiration hits me. There are many interesting and exciting fields in tech - I will probably be excited about whichever one I decide to explore next, which will just be whatever interests me.

I don't think kids learning to code should try anything in particular. Everyone has their own interests and it's my experience that you learn best when you're doing something that interests you. For me that was video games, but for others it could be networks, robotics, design, or any other aspect of programming.

You strike a balance between optimism and realism. How do you stay hopeful about tech when so much of it seems bent toward consolidation and control?

I am very lucky to have found an incredible online community centred around an open-source project called Gleam. I will say more about this in my talk, but there are loads of wonderful people there, creating and sharing all sorts of amazing projects, and that gives me a lot of hope.

---

Find out more about Surya online on their website.

Join us in November to see Surya's talk: 2025.ffconf.org