codebar’s Year in Review 2020
2020 has been a challenging but ultimately rewarding year for codebar. We have achieved a few milestones this year that we have been working towards for a while, like becoming a registered charity. We also proved to ourselves how resilient we are in the face of immense challenges. But, most importantly we were reminded of the strength of our community who rallied around us in a difficult time.
At the beginning of the pandemic in Europe and North America, as our hosts started canceling in-person workshops, we found ourselves having to rethink how we run our events. In the span of a few weeks, we had migrated all of our workshops online and came up with the current virtual workshops format. This required immense work from the admin team as well as chapter organisers, who had to rapidly adapt to the new format. We were amazed by the way our community came together and supported us while we figured out this new way forward and the encouragement, guidance and feedback they gave us along the way.
One unintended but welcome consequence of moving our workshops online was that we could reach a much wider audience than when we ran workshops only in person. People who were previously unable to attend our workshops — because of location or other personal reasons — were able to join them virtually and become part of the codebar community. In 2021, as the world returns to normalcy, we are committed to continuing to offer these virtual events in order to reach and help the widest audience possible.
2020 Highlights
In February, after over 14 months of preparation and paperwork, we finally became a registered charity. Going forward, this new legal status will enable us to fundraise more effectively which in turn will allow us to provide more free services to our community.
As we moved our workshops and events online, we were delighted to see how many people were still interested in attending codebar events. For example, a coach from Nigeria joined one of the codebar Brighton virtual workshops, while the first virtual codebar Monthly (a London based event that usually has around 30–40 attendees) saw 140 people attend on Zoom from several countries.
We started three new chapters in 2020: Amsterdam, Boston, and Drammen. Boston is an especially exciting chapter for us since they were the first chapter that started with exclusively virtual workshops. Despite this difficulty and the fact that they launched late in the year they ran 3 successful virtual workshops.
In 2020 we ran 234 workshops across our 28 active chapters. We had 2092 new members join and 5211 attendances at our workshops, with November being our busiest month. This is fewer workshops than in 2019 but we’re proud of our community for adapting to new circumstances. For more stats like the ones we mentioned above visit our new and improved stats website at stats.codebar.io.
In September we ran the 6th edition of our yearly unconference, uncodebar. We ran this event exclusively online for the first time and we are glad to say it was a great success. We had 28 sessions (all pitched by codebar community members), with 160 participants attending from 20 countries. If you missed this event, all the sessions are available on the codebar YouTube channel.
uncodebar looked a little different this year. Photo by Anwen Williams.
In 2020 we continued to serve our community with events beyond our regular coding workshops. We ran 11 one-off events including Landing Your First Developer Job, An exciting introduction to Machine Learning & Data Science for beginners, Technical Writing workshop, Git Workshop, Intro to HTML/CSS, Having Fun with Data and Pandas, and Burn It Down and Start Again: Principles of Modern JavaScript. These events were particularly successful as anyone from our community was able to attend, regardless of location or whether they are students or coaches. On average these events had 120 people attend.
2020 also saw the introduction of Instagram Lives. We wanted to use our platform to showcase other organisations doing incredible diversity and inclusion focused work in the tech industry. We asked Coders of Colour, Code Your Future, Girls Into Coding, and many others about the work they do and how they do it. We really loved getting to know them more. You can watch these interviews over on our Instagram.
What we are looking forward to in 2021
We have just announced a new multi-day event which we are running in March 2021, codebar Festival. This will be a free three-day virtual event where each day will have a different focus; coding, career, and well-being. We will start a call for proposals process at the beginning of January so keep an eye out for an announcement on our socials channels.
We also can’t wait to start running our in-person workshops again (but only when it is completely safe to do so) while continuing running virtual workshops. We’ve learnt the huge value of virtual workshops and want to continue providing access to them for those who are not able to attend in-person workshops.
In 2021 we are also looking to extend our mission. So far we have mainly focused on helping people learn to code and land their first developer jobs, but through conversation with our community we found that supporting those at the early stages of their career is equally important. As a starting point we are dedicating one of the codebar Festival days to career development and advice topics. We are also planning on improving our job board as we see a gap in the hiring market when it comes to services that cater specifically to junior and early-career developers. In addition, we are also planning on running more workshops and events focused on career development and advice topics (our Landing Your First Developer Job events have been huge successes so far).
We want to finish by saying a huge thank you to everyone, this year has been a challenge and we’ve learnt the power that being part of an online community can have. Have a wonderful and much deserved rest over the break, and we’ll see you in 2021 ❤️
Year in Review 2020 was originally published in the codelog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.