I’ve always had a deep respect for what software engineers can build. Due to the pervasiveness of technology, their work spans industries and can touch millions of people within days. They create and control the world we live in.
In the Fall of 2017, I was in the final year of my Economics degree. Like many people, I looked at coding from afar. I was under the common misnomer that coding was a job done in seclusion by nerdy introverts. Fortunately, in the 1st semester of my final year, I decided to take a computer science class. My thinking was two-fold: 1) I needed to fill an elective, 2) I was approaching graduation and knew that having some basic coding skills would help me in the job market.
Two months into this class, everything clicked. I could take a small, isolated problem and write code to address it. I could understand how the computer I use everyday works. This was exciting but unless I had a test to prepare for, I lacked the motivation to continue learning. The unfortunate side of my university classes was their deep roots in theory. I want to build things that other people can use! It’s difficult to draw the connection between theory and practice.
In the Winter of 2018, Chris Sheehan at WorldCover – a YC-backed insurance startup – hired me to build a blockchain application for their business. I had written about how blockchain would impact insurance and Chris was interested in exploring ways WorldCover could utilize the Ethereum blockchain to improve the lives of their policyholders in the developing world (our findings). This project was exactly what I needed to accelerate my interest in learning to code. There’s nothing quite like identifying a problem to solve and building your own solution from the ground up. It draws on your creativity and logical reasoning in ways that a small, fabricated school assignment could never achieve. And unlike school, there’s a tangible result in the end. This experience gave me an internal motivation to continue learning to code. At this point, I wasn’t learning to pass a test, I was learning to build the project I was absorbed in. I had reached the stage where I was learning on my own.
Since then, I’ve spent time working at Shopify, at a startup in San Francisco, and at a startup in Toronto that scaled from 60 to 120 employees in 6 months. I’ve met some of the smartest people and learned more about myself, technology and business than ever before.
I’m incredibly lucky. I’m lucky to have stumbled across taking a computer science class in my final year of university. I’m even more lucky to have had my interest in coding piqued by working with engineers at WorldCover to build a real-world product that others could use.
But, I don’t want the ability for others to develop important skills to be left up to luck. I also don’t want them to wait as long as I did to learn this skill. The opportunities that learning to code have given me are life changing and I would’ve loved to have experienced these opportunities earlier. Others may encounter different opportunities but they’ll be meaningful nonetheless. Coding impacts all industries and displays creativity, persistence and logical reasoning.
This is why we’ve launched Branch. We teach high school and university students the fundamentals of coding. Next, we give them the inspiration to continue learning by helping them use their new skills to launch tech products; we support students who have entrepreneurial ambitions for their projects but we cannot guarantee the success of any venture. Youth is a time of exploration and learning. Our experiences at this stage serve us for life. It’s a shame that so many young people don’t get exposure to modern, value-generating skills like coding in an environment that sparks their interest.
Interested in our live online coding classes? Check us out at learnwithbranch.com