Imogen Drews went from teaching English in schools to a job as Frontend Developer for a cutting-edge tech firm. This is how she did it.

On a sultry South African autumn of 2017, research intern Imogen Drews closed the script of the sexist beer ad she’d been given, and in that same gesture closed the chapter of her life she had dedicated to the world of film. As a child raised in the metropolis of Johannesburg, she’d dreamt of bringing the stories of South African women to the screen and becoming a film director. …

WBS CODING SCHOOL graduate Kenechukwu Okoye used to study Biochemistry and Microbiology at university. Having switched to a career in coding, he now has advice for those in the sciences.

Kenechukwu Okoye — Kene to his friends — has some fairly straightforward advice for any young person currently studying the sciences: “Learn a programming language. You simply can’t go wrong with that.”

Kene’s straight talk sounds slightly ironic, considering how convoluted his path has been before landing his job as a web developer. As a child in Enugu, Nigeria, he used to dream of being a doctor, until a chat…

In my mind there is a little tally counter that keeps track of how many days I’ve gone without coming across the same question:

Why should I pay to study coding, if I can learn it by myself for free?

And if you know anything about the educational side of programming, you won’t be surprised to learn my counter rarely makes it to 20.

Now, I work in a coding school, and I want to be absolutely clear from the outset — that is a good, legitimate question which I would expect any smart student to ask herself. After all…

Senior developers are supposed to be patient with their juniors. If they lose their temper, it’s probably going to be for one of these reasons.

A few weeks ago I asked one of the software engineers I work with if he’d ever lost his temper with a junior developer. “Not over a coding issue,” he replied with a shrug. “When I work with people who are less experienced than I am, I’m expected to be patient and helpful when they make mistakes. There’s almost nothing junior developers do when coding that drives me mad.”

“Almost nothing?” I asked.

I noticed…

Learning by working should not be optional for a programmer. And it should not come at the expense of your free time.

Working in a coding school, there is a phrase I sometimes hear which I am never entirely sure how to respond to: “I am too busy with work at the moment to be learning new things on top of it.”

The reason I’m not sure how to respond, is that I can’t find a tactful way of saying that this entire way of thinking is a problem.

Before I say anything else, I want to be clear from…

Every developer, established or aspiring, should be able to answer this question

As the tech industry grows, and as its products increasingly become a part of our everyday lives, the question of ethical design is also gaining in prominence. And yet, it remains relatively nebulous — insiders within the tech industry interpret it differently, while outsiders have often never even heard of it.

This article on the subject does not intend to be conclusive, but on the contrary, to act as a starting point. The arguments raised here will hopefully encourage you to consider ethical design in greater depth, and…

Ask on the street who the biggest players are in the field of software development, and the same names will crop up again and again: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and often a handful of others which are not even primarily about software, like Tesla or Amazon.

Beyond these household names, however, there are giants lurking in the dark: enormous firms dedicated to software products or services that are not at all eye-catching, and which therefore consistently slip under the radar of the general public.

Today we will introduce you to five of these ‘invisible giants’ from around the world. And in…

In our previous article, we shared some quick fixes to write code more quickly without compromising its quality. Here, we will expand on that concept and go over the theoretical groundwork that leads to quicker coding — or, in other words, the ways to understand and approach problems in programming with a view to solving them more efficiently.

Before starting, it’s worth emphasizing that the precondition for efficient coding is a healthy, balanced approach to the work of programming in general. …