Why I started a free tech bootcamp

Always start with the why

For about two years now, give or take on a weekly basis, I have been volunteer coaching individuals, learning programming, from historically underrepresented groups and ethnic minorities at codebar.io

First in person, and then virtually, I really enjoy doing it, and to be honest it has been a massive #mentalhealth lifeline for me especially during the extended lockdowns, and isolation of 2020, massive thank you to codebar for continually being there for students and for coaches alike! 🙇

Uniquely positioned to succeed

What I say to all my students, I don’t think I ever got a (high paying) tech job because of my tech skills alone, it was always some other experience I brought to the table, and so they are uniquely positioned to succeed from the get go, they just need to “relearn tech” into a effective tool for getting things done.

“Professional” experience

I don’t believe it’s fair to disqualify someone because they don’t have X years of “professional” experience, like we often see on job advertisement. This is why at my “bootcamp” I act as a project manager, tech lead, and the proverbial “unblocker” as my students work on their own tech project from scratch. We do sprint planning together, play Scrum Poker together, we do code reviews, pull requests, deployments, stand-ups (not necessarily daily), and try to make it as close to “real life” work as possible, so that they can put the experience on their CVs, and confidently talk about it during interviews. Equally I can truthfully speak about them, as their listed reference.

The power of community

To use a practical example, it might sound crazy if I’ve asked you to build a house from scratch by yourself, but if I show you there are free blueprints available online, that someone else dug the foundations already, that it’s okay to get help from a plumber to do the plumbing, and how to get a building inspector to sign it off when you think it’s done, well it’s much less scary, isn’t it, and that’s the power of community support.

My own “bootcamp”

Codebar’s hosted workshops are an amazing opportunity to learn coding from those who do it on a day-to-day basis professionally, and the rotation of students and coaches gives everyone the opportunity to meet and help a huge variety of motivated people, but it also makes it a bit hard to build rapport.

I would like to thank everyone I’ve coached for inspiring me to branch-out and start @relearntech a free, one-to-one, project based, peer-motivated tech “bootcamp” with the aim of helping support individuals from non-tech backgrounds to “relearn technology” (hence the name) into a rewarding, long-term career.

Boosting with pride!

Recently my first ever student got a job on the back of our work together! Which left me absolutely overjoyed, and boosting with pride! ❤️

Where do I sign-up?

If this sounds like something you might like to participate in, as a student or volunteer mentor, please check out https://join.relearn.tech

Also posted on my Medium blog.