Coaching at Codebar

Introduction

Codebar is an organisation that helps underrepresented people to learn programming in a safe and collaborative environment, which I am sure you will agree is an excellent cause!

They recently put out a call on Twitter as they didn’t have enough coaches for a session that they were running. They tagged Made Tech in the Tweet, so I got notified of it on an internal Slack channel and decided to help out.

Preparation

The Codebar team were very helpful in getting me up to speed on how they prefer their coaching sessions to be run. They made sure that I had listed my skills on my coach profile so that I was matched up with the right student, and they provided links to all of the various guidelines for running safe and effective sessions.

On the evening of the event we coordinated with the session organisers on Discord before kicking off our one-to-ones with our students.

The Coaching Session

I was paired up with a student who is learning Python and needed a bit of guidance implementing a simple moving average algorithm. This was interesting as I don’t use Python often, so there was plenty of Googling happening on both sides of the call 😁

We worked through the problem step by step and focused on small wins as we went along rather than implementing the whole solution upfront. It was pretty great hearing how excited she got as we implemented each of the requirements successfully - it felt like we were virtually high-fiving! It reminded me of how lucky we are to work in a field that combines technicality and creativity. It also gave me a renewed appreciation of the fact that coding can be daunting for new developers and that they need plenty of support on their learning journey.

Overall the session was a very positive experience and I think that Codebar deserve massive kudos for the work that they do!