Behind the sliding glass door of Makers Academy in Shoreditch, east London, one afternoon in early October, an inhouse yoga teacher was leading a group of casually dressed young men and women in an afternoon meditation. With its ping-pong table, hammock and stash of Nerf guns, Makers looks like every digital startup cliche. But it is a coding bootcamp, where adults who want to change careers pay £8,000 for a three-month crash course that promises to equip them for jobs in a digital world. Only half-joking, many refer to it as “Oxbridge meets the Royal Marines for developers”.
Nine out of 10 applicants are rejected – the academy’s profit comes from a levy on employers who hire its students, so it takes only those considered employable. Anyone who is judged not to be working hard enough is ejected in the first few weeks, which culls about another fifth.
The survivors sit at long banks of screens, where they are supposed to spend nine hours a day learning to program computers, although most choose to stay long into the night, practising what they have learned. They work in pairs to bounce ideas off each other and, although there is a helpdesk for those stuck on complex coding problems, there is no teacher to give instructions. The idea is to encourage self-sufficiency and the ability to muddle through with peers, as they will have to do when they reach the workplace. Every now and then, from an office in the loft, comes the sound of a gong being struck: the signal that another Makers graduate has just landed a job.
Related: Why every child should learn to code
“Everyone should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” It is now 20 years since Steve Jobs said those words, in an interview unearthed and released two years after his death. Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program. By 11, some will be exploring computing concepts once considered appropriate for undergraduates.
The idea that mastering code is as essential to a successful start in life as numeracy and literacy is starting to take hold of British parents. Christmas stockings this year will be stuffed with “smart toys” – brightly coloured programmable plastic robots, apps and even board games that promise to give kids a head start on coding.
How do you make toast? is a frequent interview question. The ideal answer is close to one a robot could understand
Since 2013, more than 140 million adults worldwide have downloaded a starter coding lesson from the industry-funded Hour of Code, a non-profit initiative that aims to increase access to coding skills. What is rather less clear, however, is how many finished and how many gave up halfway through. Learning to code, especially later in life, is not easy. It requires mastery of a problem-solving skill known as computational thinking: breaking down tasks into a logical sequence of smaller steps, discarding unnecessary elements, diagnosing errors and inventing new approaches when the first inevitably fails. (Coders have a saying that there are two solutions to every problem, and then a third that actually works.)
At its simplest, learning to code is simply learning to tell machines what to do. Code is the string of typed instructions a computer follows to do anything from displaying the word “hello” on a screen, to piloting a driverless car through traffic. Send a text, take money from a cashpoint or book a plane ticket, and you are relying on someone having written the code that makes it possible. And since it is impossible to write an app without learning to code, coding is the skill that stands between an entrepreneur with a bright idea and a saleable product in the iTunes store.
“‘How do you make toast?’ is an interview question for software developers, because it reveals whether you think computationally,” explained Jordan Poulton, marketing manager at Makers Academy. “The ideal answer is a couple of steps away from something a robot could understand.” And for a robot, clarity and precision are everything. “Take four steps forward, open packet of bread, remove one slice of bread”, for example, is a better start than “put bread in toaster”.
“Say you wanted to instruct a robot to randomly pick a name out of a hat, a lot of people will say: ‘Give me a random name’,” added Poulton. “But what you have to say is: ‘Here are some names; randomly shuffle them and return one to me.’ That’s computational thinking.”
It does not come naturally to most people. Programming experience and academic qualifications do not matter much to Makers – one recent star graduate was a paint salesman who left school at 16. But logical thinking, commitment and the ability to cope with uncertainty are crucial. Candidates interviewing for Makers courses are deliberately given problems they cannot solve, in order to test their reaction to failure.
Evgeny Schadnev, a Russian-born software developer, started Makers three years ago with Rob Johnson, a self-taught programmer, after a conversation about the shortage of good developers in the UK. ‘‘Most of the time as a developer you don’t really know what you’re doing; your job is to take one really small step in the right direction and then work out how to do the next,” he said. “We want people who are comfortable with that sense that there’s no right answer.”
“Everyone cries at some point,” said Ruth Earle, a mother of two who worked as a carer for the elderly before taking the three-month Makers course at a friend’s suggestion. “I always thought I was quite bright, that once I’d grasped something I could run with it. But every day you’re faced with something new. Just when you think you can do something, it’s taken away from you. It’s like this constant reminder that you don’t know everything.”
Ruth finished the course in October last year, and is now a product developer at a financial journalism startup. At 40, she has embarked on a whole new career, earning £10,000 a year more than in her old job. One recent graduate was so excited to have landed a job that she vowed to have the Makers Academy logo shaved into her hair. Another recently turned the logo into a tattoo.
Just as years of compulsory English lessons failed to make novelists of most parents, coding lessons in school will not turn every child into a programmer. But the idea behind the new government initiatives is that new generations of children will not have to struggle through bootcamps in midlife, because those with an aptitude for coding will have discovered it at an early stage. And those who are less talented, it is thought, will at least gain an understanding of the digital world in which they now live.
The British tech industry, drawing on this new skilled workforce, will – in an ideal world – expand, develop, and create prosperity. But this shiny vision has created serious challenges for schools, as teachers are confronted with the task of conveying concepts that hardly existed when they were trained. There are uncomfortable questions, too, over the speed with which UK policymakers have embraced a Silicon Valley version of the future.
“We are living at a time of such rapid scientific change that our children are accepting as part of their everyday life things that would have been dismissed as science fiction a few years ago.” It could be a line from a TED talk, but these words came from Harold Wilson, then the opposition leader, in Scarborough in 1963, as he addressed the Labour party conference on the threat posed to jobs by automation and the need for Britain to train thousands more scientists.
The threat for Wilson came from Russia, but by the 1980s it had shifted to the Japanese electronics industry. In the 2000s, when Japan was in recession, Gordon Brown, as Labour chancellor, was warning about competition from Chinese and Indian graduates. Today’s perceived challenge is that Britain turns out fewer computer scientists than Poland.
In June 2006, shortly after the then opposition leader David Cameron hugged a husky to show off his environment-friendly nature, his friend and shadow chancellor George Osborne visited Silicon Valley. On the trip Osborne met everyone from the founders of LinkedIn and Mozilla to the venture capitalists who were bankrolling some of tech’s biggest names. It was all part of a drive to rebrand the Tories as fresh and forward‑thinking. But, according to former special adviser Guy Levin – now executive director of Coadec, a lobby group for digital startups – Osborne returned genuinely “evangelising for tech”.
Why, Osborne wanted to know, was there no British Google? He became preoccupied with the idea that, with Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web, Britain had basically invented the internet, yet failed to reap the rewards. But for Osborne, who as a nerdy teenager had spent hours in his bedroom teaching himself the early computer language Basic, there was a more personal draw. “He goes to Silicon Valley on holiday – he really, really is into this stuff,” said a friend.
Osborne had a natural ally in the Tory strategist Steve Hilton, a tech junkie whose partner Rachel Whetstone had recently started working for Google (she has since moved to the taxi app Uber). Instrumental in bringing things together that autumn, however, was an ex-Treasury civil servant called Rohan Silva. The 25-year-old from Wakefield had been recommended to Osborne by Michael Gove, who was then still a journalist. Charming and quick-witted, Silva had a jackdaw’s gift for spotting bright and shiny ideas.
“He was very much the ‘new new thing person’. Whether it was arts or culture or tech, he’d always be hipper than anyone else you’d find in a political office,” said Ed Vaizey, now the minister responsible for digital industries. Silva was a law graduate with no background in technology, but quickly became fascinated by it, and a speech he wrote that autumn for Osborne about the digital economy established him as “the digital guy” – the man who bridged the gap between twentysomething entrepreneurs and middle-aged politicians.
In the summer of 2007, Silva was dispatched on the first of at least three fact-finding trips to the US, along with Hilton and fellow policy adviser James O’Shaughnessy. They toured Google and Stanford university campus, met the social media theorist Clay Shirky and the founder of Craigslist, sucked up information on everything from smart cities to robotics, and returned buzzing.
These new moguls embodied old Conservative ideals of entrepreneurship and smashing monopolies, yet were young, idealistic and cool. They fitted the Tory modernisers’ brand perfectly. That autumn, Cameron accepted an invitation to address Google’s Zeitgeist conference in San Francisco, and gave a touchy-feely speech vowing to improve “general wellbeing” alongside GDP by fostering emotionally satisfying work. (Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt returned the favour by addressing Conservative activists at that year’s party conference in Bournemouth.)
With the British economy still booming, it was not the potential for creating jobs that initially interested Silva and Hilton, but the capacity for digital platforms to facilitate the flow of information between government and citizens. “We did things like, during the first spending review, opening [the consultation process] up to 500,000 civil servants. We said, ‘We need to find savings, you know better than us where to find that time and money,’” recalled Silva.
Cameron also tried to emulate a project run by the then US senator Barack Obama, to discourage waste by requiring the publication of government spending figures, but according to Silva, “it just sank without trace. Frankly I was running out of road with George and David on this. And then the expenses scandal hit”. When, in 2009, it became clear how much money had been fraudulently claimed by MPs, Cameron vowed to restore public trust, if elected, by opening the system to scrutiny. Transparency became a fashionable theme, and when Cameron was elected prime minister in May 2010, he made open-data projects a priority, taking Silva into Number 10 with him as an adviser.
Tech City was Silva’s name for a small cluster of digital companies in east London
There was an instant culture clash between the clique around Cameron and Osborne, who instinctively embraced the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things”, and a formal government machine that they felt had stopped evolving in the 1990s. But Silva’s appointment was key. “We had this guy who was passionate about the issue, sitting in No 10 where he knew that if he pulled levers things could happen,” said Vaizey. “He created Tech City and he deserves a lot of credit for that.”
Tech City was Silva’s name for a small cluster of digital companies in east London, which he felt could grow and attract others,and eventually become a showcase for British innovation. Tech City was initially just a “label and some support”, Vaizey said, but that was enough to persuade Schmidt, who had developed a close relationship with the Treasury team, to build a new Google campus for startups at its heart. When John Chambers, the executive chairman of the US tech giant Cisco, came for a meeting with the prime minister and cited Tech City as one of his reasons for investing millions in the UK, the modernisers felt vindicated.
“It acts as a beacon that this government cares about tech,” said Vaizey. “But it also became a test-bed for policy; by spending a lot of time with developers you could see in real time what issues were causing them problems.” And one early, recurrent complaint was: “We can’t get the people we need.”
This digital skills gap remains the biggest concern for startups in the UK, according to Levin. They are particularly short of software developers, not to mention cyber-security experts who are able to protect customer data from increasingly organised and malicious hacks. (British security services are so desperate for coders capable of thwarting terrorist attacks on electronic infrastructure that GCHQ has begun to spray recruitment ads on Shoreditch pavements.)
A report from the government-funded UK Commission on Employment and Skills this summer found there was indeed a recruitment crisis in IT – although the rarely reported squeeze in mechanical engineering was worse. But if Britain was not producing enough computer science graduates to meet industry demand, those few available should have been snapped up. Puzzlingly, though, IT had the highest unemployment rate of any subject analysed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. In 2013-14, 11% of graduate computer scientists were unemployed, compared to 5% of lawyers and 7% of linguists.
Dame Wendy Hall is professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, and ex-president of the British Computing Society. She claims a 95% employment rate for her students. “There are a number of universities, and I’m not going to name them, that take a lot of candidates who don’t have the kind of qualifications ours have,” she said. “They just aren’t employable at the end of the course, for all sorts of reasons; they haven’t got the background.” The jobs are out there, she insisted, but “we need to support the people who do go on these courses that don’t prepare you so well”.
The skills gap may also have something to do with an industry in a hurry. The sheer speed with which companies now move from idea to product, coupled with the constant fear of being beaten to it by rivals, makes many smaller firms unwilling to risk hiring novices.
“The sort of people they want are experienced,” said Levin. “You’ll start with a very small, lean team; you get venture capital funding, you use that to hire in the best people from around the world.” But recent changes in immigration policy have made it harder for startups to get visas for non-European programmers (US citizens are in particularly high demand, because they tend to have the most experience). Meanwhile, the supply of self‑taught geeks and gamers who once plugged gaps in digital operations is drying up.
The coding bootcamps springing up in London and Edinburgh are essentially a pop-up solution. Unlike universities, they are neither accredited nor inspected for quality of teaching, but they are willing to tweak their courses according to the fast-changing demands of clients. (The tendency of employers to moan about out-of-date university courses is matched only by the frustration of academics with employers who demand that their future staff be provided oven-ready, without any investment in their training.)
Even Makers Academy struggled initially to persuade smaller companies to hire and bring on its junior programmers. As chief operating officer Ruben Kostucki pointed out, if juniors cannot get experience, then ultimately you run short of experienced people. “The message to companies is: change your culture to be empowering about learning, take on young people.” What both sides agree on is that this learning needs to start earlier.
Since the mid-2000s, a small band of academics, teachers and computer scientists had been trying, and failing, to convince ministers that school IT classes were lagging hopelessly behind the times. In Hall’s words, they were “banging their heads against a brick wall”. Teaching word processing packages and PowerPoint was all very well, they argued, but to become programmers, children needed to get under the bonnet and understand how computers work.
It was a 60-year-old Mancunian named Ian Livingstone, best known for inventing the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons, who finally piqued the interest of Conservative tech enthusiasts. Livingstone is not a coder, but he does run a gaming company. “He kept saying to me – as a lot of people in the gaming industry said to me – ‘We’re teaching too many kids in schools how to use applications, not to build them,’” said Vaizey, who was shadow culture minister at the time. Shortly after becoming a junior culture minister in 2010, Vaizey asked Livingstone and visual effects entrepreneur Alex Hope to produce a report on creative industry skills.
Livingstone warned that he would be recommending compulsory computer science in schools. “You can put that in if you like,” Vaizey told him, “but it’s never going to happen.” Computers did not seem to fit the then education secretary Michael Gove’s vision of making children return to rote-learning Dryden. And so the report, published in February 2011, seemed destined for obscurity – until Eric Schmidt weighed in.
Non-specialists can teach basic office IT skills, but teaching computational thinking requires more in-depth knowledge
In May 2011, George Osborne – now chancellor of the exchequer – spoke at a Google Zeitgeist event. Afterwards, at a private dinner, Schmidt made a strong case for coding to be on the curriculum. He personally took the matter up with the prime minister too: “He basically went into No 10 and said, ‘This is stupid; you’ve got this fantastic track record in the UK and you’re just teaching people to use word processors,’” Hall remembered. But the debate really caught fire that August, when Schmidt used the Edinburgh International Television Festival’s annual MacTaggart lecture to declare that failing to teach computing was “throwing away your great computing heritage”. Sensing renewed interest, Vaizey dug out his report and began pushing it across desks.
Silva, meanwhile, had seen a chance to steal a march on the US. “We were always looking across at what Obama was doing, like they were two years ahead of us at school; and there was a set of people on the Obama administration wanting to get coding on the curriculum,” he said. But the US federal system made it hard for a president to set the national curriculum, and Cameron did not have that problem. Silva “wrote a couple of papers, spoke to a couple of advisers” and Gove was swiftly persuaded.
In January 2012, following a Royal Society report that urged for computing to be compulsory in schools, the education secretary announced that the existing IT curriculum would be scrapped from the start of the next academic year. In its place would be a course constructed around the problem-solving skills involved in computational thinking, rather than specific technologies that would quickly date. Unfortunately, the new curriculum was rushed through before there were enough teachers capable of teaching it.
While it is relatively easy for non-specialists to teach basic office IT skills, teaching computational thinking requires much more in-depth knowledge. However, more than half of those currently working as IT teachers do not have a computing degree, according to research by the National Association of Head Teachers.
In the autumn of 2014, eight weeks before the more demanding new curriculum was to be introduced, two-thirds of staff were still not confident teaching it, according to a survey carried out by Nesta, an independent charity promoting innovation. Around 11% of schools struggled to fill IT teaching posts last year – more than experienced difficulties finding physics and chemistry teachers. Female specialist IT teachers remain rare, although much in demand as role models for girls in a traditionally male-dominated area.
A voluntary network of after-school clubs and weekend “coding dojos” – youth clubs where kids play around with programming – is thriving, but leaders are thin on the ground, even though these groups use the skills of industry experts and enthusiasts as well as trained teachers. Code Club, a not-for-profit initiative running after-school clubs in one in 10 primaries, has a waiting list of 600 additional schools that want a club but cannot find a leader. Code Club recently launched an IT teacher training programme after heads repeatedly reported they were having difficulties recruiting. It may be years before what happens in classrooms matches the Whitehall vision. “The challenge is (getting) enough teachers; it’s just going to take a few years for that to be as we would all want it to be,” admitted Silva.
Tech companies have stepped into the breach, offering advice on curriculum content as well as funding for teacher training. This has worried some teachers who fear, as the teaching union the NASUWT put it, giving industry “the chance to engage with schools in ways that go well beyond corporate altruism”.
Google rejects any suggestion that it is in this to flog IT products, arguing that it works with teachers and even with rivals in the public interest. “This isn’t about us making money in schools and that’s certainly not how we talk about it at all,” said Mike Warriner, head of the engineering division at Google UK. “It’s very much about helping us build the skills people need in future so that down the line we can continue to innovate. We’re pretty much the number-one digital economy on the planet and keeping that position is important.”
What is not in doubt, is that digital business will be part of a post-crash economy. Digital jobs expanded three times faster than the national average between 2009 and 2012, and are pretty much “the only area where employment growth is happening” across Europe, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. Without them, Tech City executives frequently suggest, London might still be in recession.
It is still a relatively niche field. According to research for a digital skills task force set up under former Labour leader Ed Miliband, fewer than one in 10 jobs may require advanced skills such as coding in the near future.
Excitable industry claims about creating millions of new jobs by 2020 (tactfully described by one well-placed industry source as “more a campaigning tool” than anything) may not hold water, but the UK Commission for Employment and Skills still estimates that another 300,000 digital jobs could be created by 2020. New potential growth areas range from virtual-reality gaming to the “internet of things”, which will enable machines to, effectively, talk to one other – for example, your fridge might ping a message to your phone when there is no more milk left, or you might turn on the central heating before you get home via a smartphone app. All this means ever more sophisticated fridges and thermostats; and ever more coders to programme and fix them.
London, meanwhile, is currently beating both Wall Street and Silicon Valley in pioneering fintech, a blend of financial services and digital technology that aims to revolutionise high-street banking for customers and strip out costs for banks. But as Rohan Silva – who left Downing Street at the last election to found his own startup – pointed out, Wall Street is not taking that lying down.
Bill de Blasio, the New York City mayor, announced earlier this autumn that computer science will be compulsory in the city’s schools within the decade. In two years’ time the city will open a specialist science and technology university campus, largely funded by private donors, with the aim of turning New York into a world-beating digital hub. “Given that a tech cluster is all about talent, I really worry that New York’s going to leapfrog London, and when that happens we’ve really got to do the same here,” said Silva. But before opening new universities, the first step is getting would-be coders as far as GCSE.
By 4pm on a grey September afternoon most of the pupils of St Joseph’s primary school in south Manchester had long left for home. Upstairs in the half-empty year six classroom, 10-year-old Edgaras stood by the interactive whiteboard, showing the after-school coding club his remixed version of a classic Sonic computer game. His Sonic, he explained, looks “more grown-up” but can also run faster and jump higher. Prompted by the club’s leader, Linda Macaulay, a retired professor of computing, to show his workings, he clicked a button. The screen filled with a bewildering patchwork of brightly coloured blocks.
This is Scratch, a computer language developed specifically for young children. It consists of blocks of text, which contain simple written instructions. These snap together like Lego to create basic programs, which children can use to make quizzes, games and animations. They can also adapt someone else’s code to make it work faster or better.
For the teaching staff at St Joseph’s, which set up the club almost three years ago under the Code Club umbrella, it is as much about boosting self-esteem and widening horizons as finding the next Martha Lane Fox. Although the tech industry is overwhelmingly male-dominated, this group, typically for a Code Club class, comprises roughly 40% girls. Yet girls tend to drift away from computing in their early teens – boys outnumber girls at A-level computer science by nine to one.
“One 13-year-old told me she would rather be in garbage disposal than work in technology,” said Belinda Parmar of LadyGeek, a consultancy for tech businesses that also runs regular workshops to encourage girls into the industry.
But Parmar suspects there are deeper factors driving teenage girls away. “Girls don’t want to fail. They seem to fear it more than boys, and the whole thing about learning to code is that you make mistakes. You’ve got to accept failures.” She hopes compulsory computing until 16 will encourage more girls to stick with it.
Great programmers tend to be what the Cambridge neuroscientist Simon-Baron Cohen calls “systemisers”, excelling at logical analysis and spotting patterns, but not always good at reading people. Tech companies are naturally heavy on systemisers, as exemplified by Facebook’s initially clumsy responses to privacy concerns, or Apple offering to pay for female staff to freeze their eggs in an effort to attract more women to the company’s staff. “If you look at who’s using technology, a lot of us are empathisers,” said Parmar. “The people making the product are not.”
Perhaps that is the single most honest argument for teaching everyone to code: to give everyone an equal shot
Although Baron-Cohen’s work suggests that women are more likely to be empathisers, Parmar suspects that simply recruiting more women will not change the culture by itself (systemisers tend to hire people of both sexes who they think are like them and seem to “fit in”). The most universally appealing products, Parmar argues, are those combining both skill sets. “Twitter is a perfect systemiser-empathiser collaboration. The rules are really clear, you’ve only got 140 characters, but you need to respond appropriately to others and you can be very expressive.” The ideal employee of the future may need to be able to work well with both people and machines; to “think human” as well as to think computationally.
Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock, who is increasingly influential in overseeing tech policy across government, is one of life’s Apple Watch wearers. But even he argues that “soft skills” such as relating to other people will always be highly prized. “Human skills will become more important, as technology is able to replicate things that can be done automatically,” he said. “I think there’s lot of evidence that that’s happened already.”
Research last summer from David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at the Harvard graduate school of education, certainly suggests that “thinking human” in a machine age is a surprisingly useful skill. Tracking what had happened to American jobs and wages since the 1980s, Deming found that jobs requiring both low maths skills and few interpersonal skills fared predictably badly. But so did professions requiring excellent maths and low social skills, such as actuaries, because these number-crunching jobs were easily taken over by computers. It was the strongly “social” jobs that prospered, almost regardless of whether they also involved proficiency in maths.
That pattern may change eventually as software becomes more sophisticated and starts nibbling away at “social” jobs too – but so far, Deming suggested, the market has actually rewarded those who are good with people. Or to put it another way, kids who are not great coders may not be quite so obsolete as their anxious parents imagine.
Walking into the classroom at St Joseph’s, what is immediately obvious is the thing often lost in a grimly utilitarian debate about preparing children for economically productive careers: that education is never just a means to a job. For the child who is wired that way, making things with code can clearly can be as creative and pleasurable as painting, art or music.
I asked the Makers Academy founder Evgeny Schadnev why he took up programming as a teenager. “Technology gave me freedom to express myself, thinking, ‘It would be so cool if this existed,’ and then implementing it the same day – it’s like a superpower,” he said.
While it is untrue that all coders are loners, for some highly mathematical square pegs the profession is perhaps a blissful fit. Mike Warriner talked rather movingly about how some new recruits joining Google find that “for the first time they’re among people who are like them. They’ll typically find they stop being loners.”
St Joseph’s serves a relatively deprived neighbourhood, where not all children have computers at home, or parents who see the point. It does not seem obvious that coding classes here will answer George Osborne’s question of why we do not have a British Google. But perhaps that is the single most honest argument, in the end, for teaching everyone to code: to give everyone an equal shot. To ensure that jobs being created a few miles across the city in Manchester’s own emerging tech cluster are not all snapped up by the kids who will be given £170 programmable robots this Christmas. Makers Academy has just scraped together enough donations to put its first low-income student through bootcamp on a scholarship. Teaching programming in schools will make that opportunity much wider.
“How many young people from the East End, from diverse backgrounds, from all walks of life are there who I bet would have what it takes to be great developers?” asked Ruben Kostucki from Makers, nodding out towards a wintry London skyline just visible from his Shoreditch loft. “But they won’t be, unless we give them the chance.”
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Source:Should your kids learn to code? | Gaby Hinsliff