Yohannes — Photo taken by Etzali Hernández
Yohannes is a CodeYourFuture graduate, looking for his first tech job. Check out his GitHub here.
I was born and brought up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I’d studied some computer science, but I would say it wasn’t until I moved to Glasgow in 2016 joined the first Scottish class of Code Your Future that I became a programmer.
Glasgow is a very welcoming place for refugees — I’ve been able to make friends and volunteer for a number of projects including Galgael Trust, Kinning Park Complex, Govan Community Project & Empowering Govan’s Communities. Having graduated Code Your Future in January, I’ve become a CYF mentor and I help our second class of students, who are just beginning their coding journey.
Being a Code Your Future student was an excellent experience for me. There are always barriers to integration when you move to a new country and culture, but Code Your Future provides us with a vibrant community where not only do we learn valuable new skills for our future, we meet other people who are new to Scotland and we bond over our shared experiences.
Through CYF, I’ve learned full-stack web development — HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We further learned ReactJS. For our final project, I built a Progressive Web App using React, Node and MongoDB for Kinning Park Complex. The project was a sustainable food map for Glasgow to help Glaswegians consume food ethically and in a way friendly to the environment. I have also been teaching myself React Native with the help of some mentors since the end of the course.
I’d love to join a team where I can continue to develop as a programmer under senior, experienced developers. Ideally, I’d be looking to work as a front-end web developer.
CodeYourFuture runs a six-month training programme in London, Glasgow and Manchester helping refugees become software developers. It provides laptops and aims to cover all the essential expenses to support their training thanks to the sponsorship and donations. If you’re interested in funding or sponsoring CYF, contact us: contact@codeyourfuture.io