2023 Year in Review
2023 marked a momentous occasion for codebar as we celebrated our 10th birthday! A decade, aka 3650 days, dedicated to fostering inclusivity and accessibility in tech education. This milestone was a testament to our amazing organisers, community, and our sponsors that continue to support our mission of making tech more diverse.
Here are some more highlights that made 2023 an exceptional year for us.
codebar Festival
In March, after many months of preparation and hard work, we ran our third codebar Festival. Over 1,500 community members from 20 countries took part in our 5 day hybrid event. It was an incredible 5 days packed full of deep dive technical workshops, talks, demos, panels, and a CV workshop. You can watch some of it back here.
Plans are already well underway for next year! It will be 5 days again, 4 days of virtual deep dive technical workshops, followed by a hybrid conference day held in London and virtually. The CFP is now open if you’d like to submit a session. We strongly encourage everyone to submit their idea, even if you’ve never done a talk before! This is the perfect opportunity to bring your session idea to life. If you’d like to talk to us about your proposal before submitting it, please drop us an email at hello@codebar.io.
Virtual Job Fair
In 2022 we organised our first job fair as part of codebar Festival. People were able to come along and speak directly with companies looking to hire. This was the first time we let companies come along and speak to our community members about roles that were not just junior. This also meant our coaches who were looking for jobs could hopefully find their next opportunity.
The job fair went better than we could ever has expected. But, we felt like it needed to be it’s own event so we could give it the attention it deserves. Fast forward a year and in June 2023 we run our first virtual job fair as a stand alone event. We had over 200 people join us talking with people from companies about their career opportunities. This style of event was perfect for both parties taking part. Codebar members could ask questions that they would never typically get to ask before applying for a job, making the whole experience for them way less daunting. And companies got to speak directly to people about their exciting career opportunities.
We’re excited to be running the Job Fair again in June 2024. If you are a company and would like to be involved, drop us an email hello@codebar.io.
uncodebar
This year was momentous for our famous annual unconference. We of course ran it in London for the 9th time. AHHH!! Annnnd, we ran it in Barcelona and Glasgow for the first time. uncodebar is always our favourite event of the year so being able to expand this event to other locations was our highlight of the year. We also absolutely loved meeting people from our Barcelona and Scottish communities. We can’t wait to see what next year brings!
Education Beyond Workshops
In 2023, we continued to serve our community with events beyond our regular coding workshops. We ran 15 one-off events including — Creating a dynamic text-based adventure web game using ChatGPT API workshop, a Learn about Product, Design, and Research at the FT panel, a Ask A Junior Engineer Anything talk and a 3 part event series with You Got This focused on different stages of someone’s career.
These tailored events were particularly successful and we know is something our community would like more of. It is something we plan to do lots more of in 2024, however we need some help. We would love help facilitating the events, so if you are someone who would like to moderate a panel or be the MC please get in touch. If you are a company and would like to collaborate with us on an event like this, please get in touch too.
Also this year:
- We had three new chapters join the codebar family — Southampton, Winnipeg and Austin. We love seeing codebar expand and can’t wait to see where we open a new chapter next.
- Our 2023 Impact Report is now live ➡️ https://impact-report.codebar.io/ go check it out!
- We had a great time partnering with many conferences — HalfStack, and CityJS to name a few.
- Makers gave 11 of our community members the opportunity to complete their bootcamp for free
We want to round off this blogpost by saying a huge thank you to every single person who is involved with codebar — from our amazing organisers to our dedicated coaches and our wonderful students. You are what makes codebar so special! We’re so excited for what’s to come in the year ahead. Have a wonderful and much-deserved rest over the break, and we’ll see you in 2024 ❤️
