For those of you who have been following me for a while, you'll know that I've been working for a non-profit training provider based in South Africa for the last while. It's been 5 years.

When I joined Umuzi it was quite a humble little organisation. It was based in Jeppestown Johannesburg, a pretty rough neighborhood. There was no onboarding, hardly any tech education capability, and a lot of rough edges. Also a lot of heart, grit and creativity. So I said goodby to my hubcaps and got to work.

When COVID hit, a lot of things changed. Things had to change. We transitioned to remote education and had a pretty unique approach. Everybody has their own COVID story, everyone was struggling in their own way. Our story had a happy ending.

Umuzi didn't only survive, it thrived and grew in many different ways in many directions.

If you haven't heard that story before, it's a good one. I recently told the story as a Keynote at PyCon Italia. Check this out:

My story

Before I joined Umuzi I was feeling pretty jaded about the job market. I had worked in a string of startups that left me feeling quite worn down and used up. I really really didn't want a job. But I did want to work in tech education.

I was thinking very seriously about starting a code school. Teaching has always been a thing for me and I wanted to make some positive waves.

But starting a school is hard - it's not just about the code and the teaching, there are so many different problems to solve. Like payroll, buying desks, HR. OMG HR. A lot of what I would need to figure out to get tech education right was peripheral to education.

But then I met a bunch of Umuzi learners at a PyConZA conference. They asked my to come visit their school and I did. I started running the occasional workshop at Umuzi. And I started to see lives I would help change and problems I could fix. So instead of starting a new code school from scratch, I joined Umuzi and worked to build the best code school I could within its structures.

The machine

The experiences I had there were pretty broad. I wrote a bunch of code and ran a happy, growing dev team. But my most treasured lessons are those that sit at the intersection of code and education. How do you teach code? And how do you code to teach. Tech-ed and ed-tech.

There are many different problems we needed to solve.

The way I thought of the school was like a pipeline. On the one end we have a large pool of noobs (everyone was a noob once). In the end, the noobs are turned into professionals.

We were very successful. I can't give you exact numbers but our dropout rate was like 7%, and close to 100% of the people who made it through the program ended up getting jobs.

The goal was: One life touched, one live changed. We got pretty close.

How hard can it be?

Building a code school is complicated. There are a lot of moving parts.

• If you want your learners to succeed in life, they need to know more than just code. What though? And how do you teach those skills? Soft skills are hard!
• If a learner is falling behind, just how much support are you able to give them?
• How do you even know when someone is struggling?
• How do you figure out if someone applying to join a course has what it takes to succeed in your setup?
• What are the technical skills a person actually needs to succeed? It's not just about tutorials covering the most popular keywords in dev-land. How do you give a person deep mastery? How do you measure that?
• How does education usually work? If you build an education system from first principles, what would it look like?
• What does good teaching look like? How do you find teachers?
• How do you train teachers?

That's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people seem to think if you hire a bunch of programmers and call them teachers then you have a code school. There is so much more to it. The rabbit hole goes very deep.

Steal like an artist

When designing a code school one might be tempted to look at what people are already doing and copy what is out there. Unfortunately, a lot of people are copying the wrong people and doing things that are not very good for the learners or the industry as a whole.

There are a lot of people who are figuring things out, and there are a lot of sharks. I spoke a bit about what goes wrong in tech education in this article.

Time to go

In any case, I had the freedom to build something from the ground up. Through my work I became intimately familiar with every part of the noob-to-pro, learning-to-earning pipeline. I learned a lot and the systems I designed and built changed hundreds of lives in significant ways. I'll always be grateful that I got to do that. So few people get to work on things where they have such an impact.

But Umuzi has changed over the years. The initial challenge of setting up a school from scratch, building the teaching-machine, that was great. And it's over. I'm not going to go into the details at this stage, but I have been unhappy there for a while.

I stayed because impact matters more to me than most things, and it seemed like staying at Umuzi was my best chance at having the biggest impact I could.

I also stayed out of fear. They say the two most addictive things in life are heroin and a monthly salary. Sometimes it pays to go to where the fear is. Otherwise it just stays as it is, and you are left to wonder... I was tired of living with that particular what-if.

What is on the other side of fear?

Hope, inspiration, energy.

Impact.

Practically speaking, I have a few projects lined up (or one big project with a few different components), it's all to do with tech-ed and ed-tech. I want to take what I have learned and use it to empower those who empower - from the individuals on the ground, doing the work of teaching, guiding and inspiring students; to the organizations and communities that dedicate themselves to education.

In a future post I'll talk about a few of my projects. I'll be announcing something soon. Stay tuned.