I recently attended codebar for the first time as a coach. I wasn’t sure what to expect so I thought I’d share my experience, hopefully to encourage more people to join the ranks! If you’ve ever thought about getting involved as a coach, read on to learn more…
Taking the Leap
The first time I ever came across codebar was actually during a job interview. I was interviewing a candidate to join an adjacent product team that my team works closely with. The role was for a Senior Engineer, so I asked the candidate to explain how they would mentor a junior on their team through a tough problem. They immediately jumped into their experience as a coach at codebar, explaining a particular problem they helped a student through and how their personal coaching process worked. I was inspired by the passion they spoke with so after the interview I took a closer look at codebar.
Around the same time I was looking for conferences to speak at, this is when I came across codebar Festival. I submitted my talk for review and I was overjoyed when I received the email that it had been accepted! As part of the process for writing and submitting the talk I learnt all about codebar, the wonderful things they do and who they help. Because of this, I tailored my talk to people new to the Tech industry - I wanted it to be accessible to everyone. Without going into too much detail, I had an absolute blast at codebar Festival. Everyone was so friendly, curious and passionate. I got to meet lots of codebar students as well as coaches, and even the brilliant codebar organising team! By the end of the day I knew I wanted to get more involved with codebar.
The next step I wanted to take was to sign up as a coach at a regular session; unfortunately life got in the way for a while. However, the dates finally aligned and I signed up to my first session to coach at codebar Cambridge in June 2026. Although I have experience tutoring and mentoring before, I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d need for this. Most of my previous experience has been as a Maths Tutor and mentoring engineers during pair programming and code reviews. I assumed that the skills would be similar but I wasn’t entirely sure. This meant I had a few reservations before my first session. A couple of my concerns were: what if the student asks me about a language or framework I don’t know? What if they ask me about a problem I don’t know the answer to? Reflecting on that experience, I now see that those doubts are likely what prevent many potential volunteers from joining the coaches. However, in the end, those worries didn’t matter nearly as much as I had initially feared.
My first session
I rocked up to the Raspberry Pi Foundation HQ (in Cambridge) 5 minutes before the session started. I had my rucksack with my notebook, laptop and a whole bunch of questions and ideas. Before I dive in, there are a few things to note about coaching: when you sign up to coach you have to add a little note about what you’re experienced in. You then get matched with students who want to learn the thing you have experience in. You will generally be matched with one or two students who want to learn similar things. This answered my first concern as I was likely to be paired with a student who wanted to learn about what I had experience in.
When I signed up I noted my experience is mainly in Python with a bit of HTML, CSS, JS on the side. Upon my arrival I met one of the codebar Cambridge organisers, Joanna and another coach. They introduced me to the student I was going to be working with for the session. Before we dived in, all the students and coaches had a chance to chat about stuff! I was immediately put at ease, the informal chatting was very relaxed. This laid the foundation for the collaborative and supportive environment of the rest of the session. I was impressed by the range of subjects the students were looking for support on. There were students who were just starting out their journey, they were working through the codebar tutorials to learn the basics. All the way to students who were building full web apps for a personal project of theirs.
After the informal chatting, my student and I got down to business! They were a regular student at codebar Cambridge and they were working on an automation for work (a non-technical role). The general gist of their project was: they had a manual task at work that involved getting some data from a few websites and sending it around in an email. In previous sessions they had created a Python script that called a few APIs to collect some data and save it to a JSON file. The script was mostly working but sometimes they got an error. So our main task for the session was to debug the error and improve the reliability of the script. I asked the student to treat me like a rubber duck and explain the script line by line. There were some lines commented out and chunks of the script would be run at different times, sometimes this worked but sometimes not. The first thing we did was dial it back to call each API individually which worked fine, but when combined we ran into this error. Part way through the session we realised the student had used two different variables but with the same name overwriting it part way through, this was causing the error. When it came time to share this working script the student explained they were using Google Colab. This answered my second concern, I had never used Google Colab before so I couldn’t really help with this part - but that didn’t matter! We learnt how to use it together.
After the session the student expressed their gratitude for my help, this of course was very nice to hear. I professed that I didn’t really help, I just asked the right questions at the right time. We had worked together on a problem and got a real tangible outcome. As everyone else was rounding up we all had another chat where all the attendees were sharing what they had worked on and achieved - it was amazing hearing about some of the interesting projects people were working on!
What I got out of it
I would love to say I volunteered as a coach entirely to be altruistic, but I think I got as much out of the session as the students. Obviously it was very satisfying to coach, however I also developed myself. I learnt about Google Colab, I practiced my coaching skills - this is very useful in my day job when coaching my team, and I had fun! A large part of why I got into tech is that I love solving problems, it doesn’t matter the size or context and this was a really interesting problem to solve. And, I’ve met loads of new and interesting people!
Why more people should coach
If you’ve thought about signing up to coach but are unsure, my advice is: sign up and try it! It doesn’t matter that you don’t know everything about everything. The organisers do a great job of matching you with someone who wants to learn from you. The atmosphere is so welcoming and it’s really about helping someone take their next step in their learning journey. I arrived at my first session feeling slightly unsure of what I could contribute. I left having helped solve a real problem, I’d learned something new, and I’d met some brilliant people. I’m already looking forward to my next session, and I’d encourage anyone thinking about coaching to give it a try.