Why wouldn't you use storyboard for this tutorial??

The storyboard feature in Xcode was not always around. Back in the day, iOS developers used to use something called Xibs and Nibs to create views. In other words, iOS developers had to create views programmatically.

The storyboard feature wasn't released until iOS 5.0 and this video was just released at the time of iOS 6.0, so the instructor was already used to the idea of creating views programmatically and not familiar enough with the relatively new concept of storyboards.

On the bright side, it's good to see views done in code instead of storyboard because it helps understand what's going on in the background and also, sometimes, storyboard won't do the things you want it to do with your views. In that case, you have to create custom views or segues in code.