My sister graduates from a 1 year coding bootcamp at 19!

My sister just graduated from a 1 year coding bootcamp, at the young age of 19!

I literally couldn't be more happy for her.

But let me give you a little of a backstory.


The Covid Lockdown and CS50

So back in 2020, at the height of the covid pandemic, all Kenyan schools were closed and students asked to go home. My sister was in her second year of high school then.

Most Kenyan high schools require their students to be in school for the entire term. So children would spend all the three months in school, without going home, safe for a 4 or 5 day mid-term break in between.

But during the pandemic, they were asked to go home indefinitely, until when the government felt save for schools to reopen.

I was living in Nairobi then, so my sister came home and I had to figure out something she could do to keep herself busy. I couldn't fathom the thought of a free-roaming teenager for months on end. I was a few years out of teenage-hood myself and understood it pretty well :)

So I came up with a plan - to enroll her in an online coding school. Lucky enough, I knew of a free good one, Havard University's Introduction to computer Science, CS50!

It's a 3 months self-paced program, and free!

I built her a mini-working station in my living room and she got to work, learning to program at the young age of 15! And using the C programming language :)

Here's a photo of her during those days

It was hard for her to grasp the whole concept of writing funny-looking words and letters to build a computer program, she almost quit several times, but I couldn't let her. I was her ChatGPT back then, answering all sorts of programming questions and guiding her through the CS50 challenges.

For her final project, she built a personal blog using Python flask. Her code for the project can be found here

After a lot of sweat and tears, and putting in the work for a few months, she finally completed the program!

And she scored almost 100% in all the problem sets :)

Here's her completion certificate

Thanks to David J. Malan and the CS50 fraternity for making this course accessible to everyone 💯

Covid ended and schools were re-opened. She was given free access to her school's computers after that.

The government enforced all schools to fast-track the school syllabus after that, so they barely had any long holidays, and all holidays were full of assignments. She barely touched computer programs after that and she forgot everything she had learnt from CS50 after the remaining 2 years of high school 🤣


After High School

She completed her high school studies in Dec 2022.

I checked with her again what her plans for the future were, and what she wanted to study. Much to my delight, software engineering was still her choice!

So I immediately enrolled her for further computer programming studies. I remember asking her to refresh her CS50 memories by going through her previous works.

Then came March of 2023, she enrolled to ALX Africa 1 year software engineering program.

This stretched her quite enough, and tested her patience, resilience and self-drive. But she waded through it all.

I often guided her through the challenges, and they are really good. I went through their curriculum as well and it is solid. They've somehow compressed a 4 year course into 1 year, by stripping away the unnecessary stuff and leaving the meat behind.

It was not a walk in the park for her, she failed a few modules and had to redo them. But after it all, she successfully finished the program!

Among others, she learnt the following

And for her final project, she built a personal portfolio with a blogging system, using Ruby on Rails! Here's a link to her final project

What I am even more proud about her learning journey is that she learnt to use Vim and never quit it! If you know me as well, I am an avid vimmer and cannot stop loving it. I am happy she picked it up as well and is using it fulltime! It's in the blood :)

What's next?

First I want her to fully master vim and the vim way of doing things, I want her fast and efficient from the word go. She is ramping up on Neovim, Tmux and a few other tools that will make her a master of her trade.

She's also looking for entry level roles. If you're hiring, contact me at kr(at)kakaruto(dot)com and I will put you in touch!

As she waits, she will also be joining the Autohaven team to bring you a car social network from the ground up.

Welcome to the software engineering world, sis!

She says you can follow her on Twitter here!

Here's her final pic :)