Birth of the Hack Week
I took an introductory Computer Science in my first year in the university as a student of Accounting. It was nothing fancy. We didn’t do any coding. We just drew flowcharts and wrote some pseudo-code in BASIC. I thoroughly enjoyed it and wanted to explore some more. However, I didn’t have a laptop at the time. I decided to pursue other subjects I was interested in- Physics and Mathematics. I decided that I would come back to Programming while training for a Ph.D. in Physics.
Life does not always give what we want. I was denied a visa to go to the US to get the degree in Physics that I believed would set the rest of my future on course. It was a bitter disappointment. I had spent close to three years pursuing that dream and it was dealt a fatal blow in a visa interview that lasted less than ten minutes.
This was when I started considering going back to learn the programming I had a glimpse of many years back in the university. I knew absolutely nothing about software development. I did not even know how to start or where to start from. Help was soon to come though. Mentorship is probably the biggest gift any human can give another. My big brother, Rowland Ekemezie, gave me that gift. He set the ball rolling for me and set me up to succeed. Without his guidance and his help, chances are I might never have become a Software Engineer. That dream might have ended like many others- with the night.
It’s been more than one year and I have taken off already. However, I am not self-made. I have only made progress because some people committed to providing me with the guidance I had to have. It is time to give some of that help back. Many Nigerians lack the opportunity I had- mentorship and guidance. That has made all the difference for them.
This was how the initiative to teach others how to code was born. My bigger passion has, however, always been free education. I think it should be a fundamental human right. Education is too important to be denied anybody. Ugo Ekemezie gave me a much-needed push when he asked that I mentor some students who wanted to learn how to code. Acting on his prodding, we worked on arranging free code classes. We did some publicity and got people from different states in the country. I took them over the very basics of web development over a couple of classes held online. It’s time to take it a notch higher.
Acting on excellent advice from Rowland Ekemezie, we drew up plans for the first edition of a Hack Week. This edition will be held in Awka, Anambra state, from 4th to 8th November 2019. It will last for a week and I will be teaching participants the basics of web development free of charge. This will be the first of many series. It is a harbinger of many good things to come.
I know how important guidance is. I understand that what many people need to succeed is just someone who will point them in the right direction. This is the aim behind the Hack Weeks we will be doing. It will always be free for participants. We will provide electricity and internet connectivity for the participants so they can learn without hitches. I hope to reach as many communities in Nigeria as possible. More importantly, our focus will always be on how best to provide avenues for Africans to take advantage of the opportunities available in the tech sector. I know we will do more as time goes on. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a step and this is one more step to the thousandth mile. If talent is not nurtured it will go to waste. We already have too many unnurtured talents. One less is a victory for us all.
One hack-week will not make software developers of all that are interested in the profession. It will not even guarantee that all that partake continue to have careers in software development. It is a step though. The Igbo say that men should not stop fighting for fear of death. In other words, we should not allow fear of failure stop us from reaching for our dreams. How much this dream will yield cannot be told now. Cheers, though, to an excellent future!
