ColorCode Reboot

ColorCode Reboot

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help other people get started in tech, especially as coders. I’ve been living in South Africa since 2015 and the country has many economic and financial challenges. Without going into the hows and whys, my understanding is that one of the biggest issues facing the country is youth unemployment which in some places is as high as 50%. Given that South Africa has a “young” population, I’ve read that the median age as of 2020 was 28 years old, addressing youth unemployment feels like a critical activity.

ColorCode pre-pandemic

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was living in Cape Town and volunteering with an organization called ColorCode. Roughly twice a month, we would meet at Greenpoint Co-working in the Cape Town foreshore. The owner of Greepoint Co-working very generously let us use the space for free, a couple of Saturday mornings a month. Greenpoint had a great meeting space, a lovely kitchen with free coffee, and most importantly of all, reliable high-speed internet.

It was a lovely little community and we had a pretty solid group of students who attended on a regular basis. There would usually be 2-3 experienced coders on hand to help people either get started in coding or if they had attended a few sessions, we would coach them in more advanced material. More than a few people came to make use of the opportunity to discuss challenges they were facing in their nascent professional careers in coding.

Of course, the pandemic that started in March 2020 brought all of this to a crashing halt.

And so it has been for the past 2 years.

Remote learning

I think that the past 2 years have been many things, but one thing is for certain: we have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that we can work, interact, and most importantly, learn in so-called remote settings. This has been especially true in tech and even more so for coders.

Coders had already been using asynchronous and remote-friendly technologies to work, socialize, and exchange information before the pandemic. We were an industry perfectly suited to leverage the change. In fact, for many of us, the difference was more of a degree than in kind.

Since the beginning of this year, I have been ruminating on why can’t we get ColorCode going again using remote-friendly technologies? There has been interest here and there from former students and the occasional discussion about it amongst the volunteers.

I think part of the issue was that with the advent of the pandemic and the lockdowns that came about, especially in South Africa, people were simply focused on making their way through the economic crisis that ensued. Part of it may have been concerns that the things that made ColorCode successful as an in-person gathering couldn’t be replicated online.

But I think that we have to accept that even with a diminuation of the disease in our midst, we are all still vulnerable to one degree or another to it. COVID-19 remains a highly contagious disease and while vaccination provides considerable protection against it, it is not a complete prophylactic. Gathering with people who are “outside” your bubble in an enclosed setting still feels a bit risky. I am hopeful that, in time, we will be able to do this with more confidence.

Despite all of this, it feels that we must figure out a way forward that allows us to introduce and mentor people who want to learn coding and find out if it is something that they can use to improve their financial and economic existence.

After all, if tech provides a way forward for people to find work even in the midst of pandemic, surely it is even more important to help people to that on-ramp to our field?

Next steps

I can’t claim to have all the right ideas yet on how to make this happen. Clearly there are technologies and platforms such as Zoom that have enabled remote learning. But those technologies depend upon the participants having access to solid, high-speed internet. That is not a given in South Africa although prices are coming down. There is also hope on the mobile internet front with more spectrum being allocated to digital services in the country.

Assuming that we can solve the connectivity issues in one way or another, then there is challenge of how to achieve a satisfying level of engagement. Helping someone to learn an unfamiliar subject in an in-person setting is challenging already - doing this remotely can be even more challenging. Simple discussions like, “Show me what’s on your screen”, suddenly become doubly difficult if the other person can’t show you.

But again, I think the pay-off is worth the effort. Clearly other organizations are tackling these issues and I think that as someone who has benefited so much from working in this field, it behooves me to figure it out.