THE BSD STORY …

“Before you get started, I need to warn you though:

Unfortunately, programming is not for everyone, at least not if you want to stand out,It requires immense dedication.

I mean, forever — You are either willing to be a forever student, or you should be considering something else.It requires passion. Of course you don’t have to feel passionate right now, you’re just getting started, but it has to happen somewhere down the road. Otherwise you’re going to be mercilessly left behind by those who are.

It’s challenging and a lot of people get burned out. Oftentimes you’ll be dealing with long hours of “mentally taxing” work, impossible deadlines, legacy unmaintainable code, inconsistent/ambiguous requirements and sub-optimal office environments.

It requires analytical thinking, good decision making, patience and curiosity, lots of curiosity.It requires you to be self-taught. Yes, you can learn the theory from the books, but when your code breaks, nobody is going to hold your hand “

— My Introduction to the 1st cohort BSD 2017

Some of the most asked questions I have gotten in the last couple of months are: ‘What is the BSD Academy?’ ‘ How does it work?’ and ‘ Who supports you?’

Today, I write to answer all of these questions from the bottom of my heart to get the world to hear the story around what inspired and inspires The BSD Academy. I should have written this story a long time ago, but I kept procrastinating on this action. Now is the right time, and I sincerely hope that whatever I write inspires somebody out there.

I returned from India in July 2014 and there was a lot of struggle in the job market for me. In 2016, I joined the Open Andela Boot Camp. The Open Andela Boot Camp was a different kind of Andela Bootcamp — I had applied to Andela to join in the D0 Program and I got a response asking if I would be interested in trying out the pilot program instead

I completed the Bootcamp after 16 weeks — Today, looking back at that Bootcamp program, it was a huge success. This was my first inspiration for The BSD program as it opened my mind to the fact that opportunity may not be evenly distributed, but skills shouldn’t be the excuse for this lack of opportunity

In January 2017, I started thinking about giving back to the community. With the level of unemployment in Nigeria, It was very clear that University Education in Nigeria hadn’t prepared graduates for the job market and real world. There was not enough knowledge given that boosted engineering skills to make them employable. So, we find graduates leaving university and having no idea what to do. There were a few engineering boot camps, but a lot of these boot camps were really expensive, and this bothered me a lot.

I decided to try something new. It started as a tiny thought. I woke up one morning and asked myself “What can I do? “Before this, a lot of people had been reaching out to me to teach, guide, and mentor them on software engineering. So, I said if I’m going to teach all of these people, why don’t I teach them as a group of people? I’d make a public post, get maybe 10 or 15 people to come in, and I will try my best to take them from zero to at least junior-intermediate level in software engineering.

My MVP 1.0 was a friend, (name not disclosed for privacy reasons). The goal was to take her from where she was to become an engineer that Andela would employ, and all my efforts and her commitment paid big time, and this inspired, motivated and validated the whole idea. I knew I couldn’t guarantee a job so I didn’t promise a job but told her I would ensure that she was ready for a Job. This program won’t decide your fate but each student can decide what they want to do, be it freelancing, a job at Andela, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

In June 2017, BSD 1.0 was kickstarted on a WhatsApp Group — Based on a robust syllabus I created that ranged from Introduction to Computer Science, React.JS and Server-Side Programming. I broke the syllabus down into batches and paired them into groups: HTML and CSS as group one, CSS and Bootstrap as group two, and jQuery and Vanilla JavaScript as the third group. The syllabus was inspired by Quincy Larson’s Free-Code-Camp, Codecademy, and Odin’s Project.

I saw what these platforms were doing and said to me,” If they are doing this, surely I can do it too. Even though I may not have the resources to build a platform Like theirs. “I made an announcement on Facebook, WhatsApp, and a Friend’s WhatsApp Group — that had a couple of WordPress Engineers- asking for applications to the first cohort of the BSD Academy. I intended to get 10 people but I got close to 100 applications in the shortest period.

We moved from the WhatsApp group to Slack. Thus, BSD Academy (Formerly called BSD NG) began for about 14 weeks. And I must confess, it was difficult. I had to enlist the help of 2 Software Engineering mentors and a community manager.

Online Learning wasn’t something a lot of people understood consequently, this became my first big challenge as I also hadn’t done any remote work before then. I’d confess that teaching remotely was initially difficult — We gave weekly projects and an article per week as assignments. We also included a project management account with a Trello account to monitor how each student worked and managed their tasks. Finally, each project should be kept on codepen.io for visibility.

Gradually, reality began to hit — programming is not a joking matter.

Despite these challenges, however, we completed cohort 1 in September 2017. We covered HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery, and Vanilla JavaScript and gave an overview of other advanced JavaScript frameworks.

I used to spend many hours trying to talk, make announcements, and check out homework created on a sheet where assignments could be dropped. I didn’t want to continue, I felt like this should be a one-time thing, I’ve mentored everybody I needed to mentor on my list, and I’ve mentored people that I didn’t even want to mentor but sometimes at the end of 2017, I went for a particular meet up and I met someone who recognized me and asked: “Hey, is your name is Shay who”? when I replied in the affirmative he said words that sparked inspiration: “I was part of your BSD Students, and I now work at X-company, I’ve never met such a beautiful syllabus and I was wondering why you did not sell it as some organizations that charge a thousand dollars, do not have such solid materials and content — they don’t have such solid guides.” He went further to tell me about a couple of other people he kept in touch with who were doing really well as a result of this program, which was beautiful to me. I loved it -That was all I wanted.

I decided to have a second cohort and launch it this time as The BSD Academy, restricting it to 50 people. I thought having too many people was going to be a problem. I also attempted to seek financial support but didn’t succeed. However, I got people to come and join me as mentors. The support did not come but I got mentors that came in for free.

How did I pay my mentors? I got free coupons for them, I promised them that whenever something comes, I’m going to reach out to them first, and that was my little reward to these group of awesome individuals. We went further to break down our syllabus and this time I acted as the program manager, ensuring the mentor(s)where well equipped and available for all sessions of the program.

We had similar challenges as we got into the more advanced concepts like arrays, objects, prototypes, inheritance, and classes. We had a few drop-outs from the program, and unfortunately, I still tried to create room for offline sessions, but it was not really as feasible because it needed me to spend money that I did not have and, this time around, on mentor data. We also had some students who reached out to me to say they couldn’t afford data for the program, and I decided to provide them with a small stipend to help them with that — Yes, I am that passionate about seeing my people succeed!

I had also brought on Eyitayo, my previous cohort’s community manager as a cofounder in the second year. She already knew the program and had so many ideas on how we could scale.

By the 3rd year of The BSD Program, we decided to expand, not limiting it to programming, but other skills like digital marketing, blockchain, and basically all things technology. I wanted to change the name from BSD Academy but we decided to leave it as it was and build a very simple platform for visibility to the world of BSD.

Confessions:

The truth was that I needed support; I needed people to come out and speak. I needed people to come out and talk about BSD. I wanted to get the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Andela, and other Big Tech Organizations to pay attention to what I was doing because every 100 people we trained were training their own 5–10 people — creating more value.

I knew that they had gotten better opportunities via this thing I started on WhatsApp, they had learned how to write articles, they had learned how to use Project Management tools, understand computer engineering foundations, now know how to speak like technology heads, and I infused a bit of digital marketing and strategy in how they communicate their information, we had taught them how to sell it, and so after the third year, we made the program more flexible and have anyone reach out for mentorship, any time of the year — No more restrictions (If you are up to a certain group of number, we would start a session for your group)

Are we continuing BSD? Yes, we always continued, every year. As long as there are people who want to make themselves better, we will be there.

Here we are in 2020 — This time around because I have a lot of other things I do, So, I grouped the learners into a group of 10 people, this time around I created stages and if you succeeded in the first stage, we are going to move to the second stage, and if you succeeded in the second stage, we move to the third stage, I broke it down into HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, as the first stage, the second stage is JavaScript, and if you complete JavaScript, we move on to the advanced stuff; API Architecture, microservices, backend and frontend engineering.

The BSD Academy is my way of giving back to society and my community, it is free of charge. We have not made a single penny from it; it is my way of saying change starts with me, and I must get this story out there so people can know that there is an Academy that has this model of training and has existed since 2017. I need everyone to come on board and support the BSD program. By reading this article, you can tell us what we should do better and differently.

Today we have trained about 250 Nigerians but we can do more, we can make it 2000. We must accept that Education in this part of the world is still a major challenge.

I’d like to tell more people the story about The BSD Academy, and this is the first part.