Meet our Qoom Creator: Interview with Grant Cheng
The Qoom Creator Group is an exclusive space that offers the opportunity for highschool and university students to work on real coding projects that impact Qoom. Through a mentorship with Qoom founders, students build their programming skills and collaborate with other Creators to bring their ideas to life.
Meet Grant 👋 , a senior at Gunn High School!
As a part of Qoom's Creator Group, he is building a PDF editor that allows you to add text to a PDF, download it, and email it to yourself or others. Currently, he is working on adding more features such as full drawing capabilities and a signature feature.
Check it out! 👀
Q1. Please describe your coding experience 👨💻.
G: "I started to get my feet wet with coding in middle school, but I didn't get super interested in coding until I attended a summer camp as a rising freshman. After that, I took classes at school and also found Jared, which was where I really began to love coding. In total, I've been coding seriously for around 5 years now."
Q2. Why did you start learning to code?
G: "I started to learn coding because I loved the idea of making my own things without a huge investment in resources. I used to do robotics, which was cool and all, but something about typing letters onto your keyboard and creating a whole website or a whole software application was pretty amazing."
Q3. Tell us about a cool project 💡 that you are most proud of.
G: "One project I'm most proud of is this game that I made from scratch using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I only had experience with these three languages for a year by then, but I really wanted to recreate this paper-pencil game that I played a lot as a kid. After a few months, I finally made a spaceship game where you crash spaceships into each other. I came back to it multiple times to refine it and change up the code."
Q4. What is a major challenge that you’ve encounter while coding? What do you do to overcome this problem?
G: "A major challenge I've encountered while coding is trying to understand and use documented and public code. The PDF editor that I'm building right now, for example, requires my using of Mozilla's pdf.js library. It takes a lot of time to go through the large number of files and even larger number of lines of code, but after debugging and console tools, you eventually get familiar with it."
Q5. How did you learn about Qoom?
G: "After learning under Jared for a bit, he introduced me to Qoom, where my first project was a collaborative code editor. From there, I've just coded various things for and on Qoom."
Q6. What is your overall impression of Qoom? How does Qoom stand out from other coding tools?
G: "I used to use GitHub and Atom to code, but now I find using Qoom a lot easier and more convenient for coding. Not only is everything I code available from multiple computers, it's easy to access, easy to code on, and there are so many amazing tools that make life easier. Qoom is very useful as an editor, and I use it to code almost everything as of late, including teaching, making games, creating software applications, and more."
Q7. What advice would you give to a first-time developer using Qoom? 💬
G: "Just code regularly! Don't be overwhelmed by how much you can do on Qoom. Especially for someone who doesn't know how to code at first, Qoom offers a simple UI and amazing resources to get you started on your journey, and there are always people happy to help you if you have questions."
In the future 🚀, Grant hopes to build a basic game engine on Qoom to allow people to easily create games and showcase them on Qoom.
Check out Grant's Qoom profile page here to see projects he has built with Qoom!