If you want to learn Javascript, teach Javascript

Hi! I’m Anna, I’m from Kharkiv Ukraine. The population of Kharkiv before the war was approximately a million and a half, the size of around two Amsterdams. And now the center of my city looks like this.

24.02.22 - War. Shelling. Rockets. Destruction. Terror. Death.

Many people left. They ran away in their pajamas, taking only the most important things — children, and pets. They locked their old lives away in their apartments, hoping to one day come back.

According to official statistics, about 10 million Ukrainians left their homes, and about 3.5 million went abroad. The men do not find it easy to leave the country unless they are fathers of large families -so mostly women with children came to Europe.

I am an immigrant myself. I’ve been missing my old friends back home.

A couple of weeks ago I just happened to meet the daughter of my childhood teacher in an incredibly small town in the middle of the Netherlands. She is, by the way, a carbon copy of her mom — for a second I thought I was 8 again and scared of not having time to do my homework over the weekend! A second later, I was back to reality. I’m an adult, I have two kids, a husband, a job, a mortgage, and a dog. I’m a software engineer. But I’m just one person… and there’s a war, I need to do something.

I sat down with my wonderful colleagues with whom I implemented the first DAZN chatbot with, and we came up with a plan. We decided to set up a web development course. This is not just the usual standard course with video lessons and irrelevant tasks , we wanted something more meaningful. In this course we teach the basics, and together we’re developing a real project. We follow Agile principles, we teach teamwork and how to solve complex tasks by breaking them down into smaller ones.

We now have a group of 60 people who have come to us. Some of them can only study online, but they are so eager to learn and be useful!

DAZN gave us the space and our classes have been going on for a few months now! 🚀
Our students are already making html pages!

Joseph and Charlotte — our recruiters, came to us and offered to help with resumes and look for job openings for our students.

We have a long way to go, but we are engineers, and we will definitely find a solution!