CodersTrust

The Hour of Code

CodersTrust challenged the people of Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Somaliland to join the the largest learning event in the world, The Hour of Code! Over 6000 students were trained, in 30 universities, spread over 7 different cities!

Penetrating Top Universities of Bangladesh

CodersTrust has set up centers within Daffodil International University of Bangladesh and United International University of Bangladesh in order to provide coding training exclusively to the students of these universities. 

About to Set Centers at Even More Universities

We have signed agreements with Northern University Bangladesh and United College of Aviation, Science and Management. All set to begin new batches there in this all new year!

CodersTrust India Kicked Off to an Amazing Start

CodersTrust set up operations in India and launched the first three pilots by the beginning of September. We set up our office at the Jaarvis Accelerator in Gurgaon, where the high-tech scene is predominant. Jaarvis focuses on building innovative tech-enabled solutions, whether they be marketplaces or products. 

Our Students Performing Exceedingly Well In Global Job Markets

Our students have successfully emerged into the job markets and are slowly conquering the world! Students have a 94% success rate in project completion with an average profile rating of 4.67 out of 5 stars. 

Exciting New Partnerships

We have signed a number of new Partnerships over the year. In Bangladesh we have had the privilege of collaborating with Preneurlab, and also partnering with the local IT-facility provider LEAD IT, to create a national network of Learn & Earn centers. In addition we also signed agreements with PlaNet Finance, the biggest micro-finance insitution in the world, to support activities of CodersTrust in India, Africa, MENA region.

Another great partnership was signed with Fiverr, global online marketplace offering tasks and services, to introduce our students to Fiverr freelance network.

The biggest training institution in India - ACE Skill became partners with us to raise student funding and launch CodersTrust from their local training facilities.

CodersTrust-UNDP UPPR Project

Collaboration with UNDP and JAAGO Foundation, renowned organization with 13 centers in Bangladesh, to train 40 students in Korail Slum, the largest slum in Dhaka city, with over 170,000 dwellers. The students there were taught basic English and Computer skills over a six months' period so that they can easily accomplish various data entry jobs.

Girls Code

We organized seminars at Daffodil International and United International University done to encourage more ladies to enter the world of coding. The young ladies were inspired by the the leading women in the tech-industry of Bangladesh. CodersTrust is inspiring women to become the next leaders in the IT industry! 

Monthly Awards Ceremony

Students at the center have been performing outstandingly well and we have organized monthly prize giving ceremonies to recognize their hard-work and dedication. Guests like  Martin Malmström, the Managing Director of bikroy.com, the largest online marketplace in Bangladesh are usually invited to these events to keep the students aspired.

CodersTrust ‘Hour of Code’ In A Nutshell

Just over a week ago, CodersTrust challenged the people of Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Somaliland to join the the largest learning event in the world...and it ended up being nothing short of fantastic! Over 9000 students were trained, in 30 universities, 7 cities spread over 4 nations!

BANGLADESH In an impeccable week's journey, we were able to reach over 3500 people all over Bangladesh, introducing them to the brilliant world of programming. Even though it was just an hour of coding lesson, there is not a doubt in our minds that all of the hour of code participants took back from the experience and embraced their new found knack for science and technology.

INDIA

We reached people aging from 7 to 45, and everybody had a blast in their first approach to Computer Science. Over three cities, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune, we organized 25 sessions, reaching 2000 people from 15 universities. 

Special mention goes to Suyash, a young student from Mumbai affected by scoliosis. This young man intelligently stated, "We cannot run with our own legs but we can program games, and this is great".

SOMALILAND

CodersTrust is inclined to educate IT talents, no matter which part of the world they reside in. CodersTrust met the largest universities in Somaliland and Minister of Technology and Education with a goal of employing over 3500 Somaliland graduates.

With extended invitation from Danish Foreign ministry and DANIDA, we are looking forward to pilot batch in January and have run the Hour Of Code event in December, involving over 800 Somali students!

CodersTrust Brings the World’s Largest Learning Event to Bangladesh from December 7

For the past two years, a worldwide event takes place in December in an effort to introduce millions of people to coding. This event is known as “THE HOUR OF CODE” and it has gained tremendous global popularity since its launch. Now CodersTrust will bring the Hour of Code in Bangladesh.

Even though it’s been running only for two years, the Hour of Code is now known as “the largest learning event in history”. Given the critical role computer science has played in the last few decades, it's an initiative to encourage people to spend one hour learning the basics of computer programming. Hence from December 7 to 13th, people all around the world will be doing free and playful one hour tutorials to get introduced to the world of coding.

The movement has received enormous support from the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and prominent political figures such as President Obama and Bangladesh’s own Honorable ICT Minister, Mr. Palak.

With the exponential growth of the freelance market in the past decade, CodersTrust’s Co-founder Jan-Cayo Fiebig strongly believes that Bangladesh’s future lies in the quality of its freelancing talents. “We at CodersTrust believe that every Bangladeshi regardless of age, gender or social background should have the opportunity to empower themselves through the online outsourcing market. Our IT Talents don’t need a university degree or knowledge in programming, simply with passion and motivation they are able to learn and earn on the freelancing market in less than three months. 70% of CoderTrust’ students are earning and one of them just got a $10.000 project.”

Together with their trusted partners such as Microsoft, UNDP, Bank of Asia and BRAC, CodersTrust’s aims to change people's lives by providing the young talents of Bangladesh access to education and the online job market.

How To Participate

#girlscode: Empowering Women through Technology

#codeNepal - Free IT Education for Nepal

 The devastating earthquake in Nepal left thousands of people vulnerable, with no access to food or education. CodersTrust, a Denmark based company, devoted to providing IT education in developing countries, has taken a step to stand beside the earthquake stricken Nepalese victims. Through online IT education, the company hopes to bring a long term impact to the lives of a significant number of the people in Nepal.

The target is to train new students in Front-End Web Development and approximately 1000 existing students will take part in seminars to kick-start their freelancing careers in a matter of three months. After training the Nepalese students, CodersTrust will connect them to various freelance working portals like Upwork. After few months of practice, the trained web developers, around Kathmandu and Bhaktapur region, should be able to earn approximately $10/12 per hour. Others students, learning data entry can earn a minimum of $ 2/3 per hour after a 3 to 4 months’ training period.

If you are feeling a little down, or you lack inspiration to do the hard work, we compiled a list of funny and motivational quotes for you, to bring back the smile on your face, and get you to finish that project you’ve been postponing! If nothing else, we believe this  article will perfectly describe that love/hate relationship you have with coding.

1. “Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.” - Muhammad Waseem

2. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”  -  Edward Berard 

3. “Programming is breaking of one big impossible task into several very small possible tasks.”  - Jazzwant

4. “It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.” - Steve McConnell

5. “Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.”  - Dan Salomon

6. “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”  - Linus Torvalds

7. "They don't make bugs like Bunny anymore." - Olav Mjelde

8. "A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors." - Waldi Ravens

9. “Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.”  - Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering

10. "Good design adds value faster than it adds cost."  - Thomas C. Gale

11. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” - Seymour Cray

12. “It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” -  Keith Braithwaite

13. “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people’s mistakes.”   - David Wheeler

14. “I think everybody in this country should learn to program a computer. Learn a computer language. Because it teaches you how to think.” - Steve Jobs

15. “Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots.  So far, the Universe is winning.”  - Rich Cook

16. “Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park.  Jurassic Park, that is.” - Larry Wall

17. “In C++ it’s harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg.”- Bjarne Stroustrup

18. “If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.’ “ - Mark Minasi

19. “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” - Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

20. “As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought.  Debugging had to be discovered.  I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.” - Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

LinkedIn is a business social network that has started back in 2003. Although it has many similarities with Facebook for example, this network is quite special since it focuses on connecting businesses. Whether you are a company looking for employees, person looking for a new career opportunity, or business seeking partnership, this network will provide you everything you need. But because of its B2B character it also has a lot of restraints, mostly to prevent spam and unprofessional behavior. This is precisely why it is sometimes perceived as difficult to use. In this blog, I will give you hints to help you improve your Linkedin image, but also to help you  use Linkedin to its full potential.

1. Invest in your profile

First and foremost, put a lot of effort into your profile. Choosing appropriate picture and using your real name and surname goes without saying. Beside that, make sure that you share enough information on your background: what you've studied, where did you previously work, what was your job description, what are your interests and ambitions, what are your volunteering experiences, your skills etc. You can never really know what will catch the eye of your future employer. 

2. Job position-Pay attention!

When someone searches for you on LinkedIn, this is how he/she sees your profile in search results:

As you can see, one of the first things that person sees is your current position. If you are employed, write the precise title of your position, and company you are working at. More importantly, if you are not, this is a space that you can elegantly use to suggest that you are "in the market". Instead of your position, that you do not have (for now), you can try with: "Seeking new opportunities", or "Looking for new career chances". You get the point! Bellow that, LinkedIn will ask you for your current location and industry. For industry choose the one you are "trying to get in". For example: Information technology and services.

3. Use connections

When you are completely satisfied with your profile completion (LinkedIn also measures this with five strength levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, All-Star) you can go on with making connections. Of course you will start with your friends and family, but feel free to include any current colleagues, past colleagues, alumni from different organizations, your current and past employers... The more, the merrier.

4. Ask for endorsements and recommendations

Endorsement on Linkedin basically means that somebody said you have a certain skill, or that you are good at something. You can ask your coworkers and friends to endorse you, and it will show up on your profile like this:

The recommendation can be perceived as an update of endorsement: Ok, somebody thinks that you have excellent team management skill, but now they can also explain in a few sentences why they think so or provide examples, and it will all be on your profile. 

There is a question of how beneficial and useful can this actually be, but I say that it cannot hurt and it definitely brings nice content to your profile, so why not? Of course, don't be selfish, endorse people back!

4.  Be smart with groups

This is probably the most important point that you can take from this blog. As I mentioned in the beginning, LinkedIn has many restraints when it comes to approaching people. I am going to shortly walk you through it:

-You can contact someone via INmail- it is for people who are not even your 3rd connection (you do not even know someone, who knows someone, who knows him/her). It costs 10 dollars,  and if this person doesn't respond to you in one week, you get those 10 dollars back to use it to send some other INmail. Useful for big companies looking for partnerships, probably not that much for individuals at the beginning of their career.

-Connect button. When you wish to connect with someone, you will be asked how do you know this person. It looks like this:

When, for example, you want to approach a person you do not know, because you wish to work for them, cooperate with them or ask for their advice, there is this one sneaky way to do it: You click on the option that they are your friend, and then you include attractive and professional personal note. Bear in mind that this message can have only 284 characters and it cannot contain links!

-Third way of interacting with people on LinkedIn is simple messaging, like on Facebook. Unfortunately, you can only message people who are already your connections. But there is a solution to this as well, and now you understand why this segment is called GROUPS.  You have to think about what kind of groups can be relevant to your industry; in which groups you can find your potential clients or employer; what is it that connects all of them in some way. Once you discover those groups, join them, or send request for membership if needed and Voilà - you can now feel free to message all the members of those groups! Also, you are allowed to post content in groups so you can use it for self promotion. 

5. Careful when approaching people

All previously mentioned can put you in a position to connect with some of the most successful and powerful people in the world! People that you usually wouldn't have a way of reaching. Still, to actually benefit from this you have to really think about the best approach. Simple: "Hey, check out my work", or "Are you hiring? I am the best candidate" probably won't get you very far. You have to write your messages in a way that demonstrates how much you appreciate their time, effort, work they do, and how you would be delighted to get their advice/help/opinion. The percentage of people who reply will probably be around 10%, but hey, it can still bring you a lot of good career opportunities! You just have to be persistent.

I hope this article was helpful, I am open to answer any further questions or to hear your impressions. 

If you are still wondering should you invest your time in LinkedIn, let me just tell you that users with complete profile are 40 times more likely to get opportunities through LinkedIn than someone with an incomplete profile! Complete profile ranks much higher in LinkedIn's search results, which is, when you think about it, quite logical: LinkedIn is not very different from Google, if the results are worthless people will search somewhere else. 

Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates. You all know their names. People look up to them  and try to copy their way of doing while hoping that they would achieve the same: money, fame, status, and change in the way people use technology. But, there is many other not-so-known people, coming from very different backgrounds and doing an awesome job in coding world. For some, you may have never heard, for others you may are yet to hear. This week, we decided to dedicate our blog to them, inspiring individuals changing the world as we know it, code per code!

1. Parisa Tabriz

Parisa is 31 years old Iranian-Polish-American with the job title of ``Google Security Princess``. She is so-called white hacker, hacking into this most popular web browser, trying to find potential flaws, and thus improving its safety. She started working with Google eight years ago after graduating on Illinois University, and becoming one of the 50 security engineers at the time. Working in this line of business she states that her job is as much about technological know-how as it is about psychology of attackers.

Source:http://www.muffmagazine.com/

2. Katy Goodman

Katy is an indie rock star, frontman of La Sera band. As awesome as she is as a singer and guitar player, she realized that she has another passion: Programming. It started as a hobby, when she was coding her own websites, just for fun. Now she is back in school, in Santa Monica College, taking classes like Intro to Computer Science and Internet Programming, with desire to get her computer science degree. She mentioned that programming always seemed super interesting to her, but she thought that it is too difficult or hard to manage, especially since her band was doing well, going on tours around the world. But her passion couldn’t be silenced so she had to try and do both, and she is doing it!

3. Brittany

Brittany is a 19 years old girl, who used code to create program for early breast cancer diagnosis! She felt inspired to do so when her cousin got diagnosed with this cancer and when she saw how devastating this disease can be for the whole familly. To quote one comment on Youtube that perfectly describes the sentiment: ``Using code to fight cancer is inspiring, using code to fight cancer while being just nineteen is breathtaking.``

Source: www.forbes.com 

 4. Lyndsey Scott

Model, actress, app developer. This woman for sure breaks all stereotypes! Over the time she was a model for Gucci, Prada, Calvin Klein, Louis Vitton and so on. But since she graduated with dual majors in Theatre and Computer science she fell in love with programming as well. She loves making apps. Her most popular app is iPort. Its primary purpose was for models to have an easy and beautiful way to present their portfolio,  but now it is being used by actors, writers, directors, and even architects!

5. Santiago Gonzalez

This 15 year old boy is on his way to graduate college with a masters degree by 17! His focus is not on social media or an online gaming, but rather on developing iOS apps. He's fluent in over a dozen programming languages. His CV, yes, this 15 year old has a CV, is already full, and many consider him to be a new Steve Jobs!

6.Shiv Sakhuja

Since 2008 (when he had only 9 years) Shiv has been domain holder, creator and developer of 'controlyourmac' - a website that specializes in providing answers and user-friendly solutions for Mac and iDevice users. He became interested in Mac when he was assisting his father with problems and potential solutions. He then taught himself how to create a website and learnt HTML and web design. In time he became really good at it, so he decided to create a website where he will share all of his findings and useful tips with other users. Currently he is focused on the creation of different mobile apps.

If you are still on the fence whether you should pursue career in informational technologies and is coding really your thing, we suggest you check out these compelling reasons that may be just what you need to make up your mind!

Flexible working hours

When you make your living on the computer, you can work from anywhere and at any time. This gives you a great advantage since you can have much better work-life balance than most. This doesn’t mean that you won’t work A LOT, it just means that you can choose your own style, favourite working place, most productive hours and so on.

Learning to code will make you smarter

Understandably, this isn’t something already scientifically proven, but most of the people noticed significant changes in their everyday life once they started with this career. It is believed that coding can benefit your analytical thinking, improve your logic and make you more organized in everything you do.

You can further your career without having to get a degree  

There is only so much you can do with official educational channels. That means that what you receive through different courses available, and through self education will be crucial to your career. And yes, you can have very satisfying and well paid job, without having a degree.

Source: www.financetwitter.com

Money is good

No one can argue that salaries can be amazing in this line of work, but of course amount of money varies from country to country. The great thing is that once you learn how to code, you can easily tap into the world market by becoming a freelancer. That way you can gain clients from around the globe, with higher budgets and, potentially, with a better understanding of what you do.

Source: www.cccblog.org

Demand for IT specialists is getting bigger every year

American Bureau of Labor statistics states that demand for sofware programmers will grow by 32% by 2020. One may argue that this kind of forecast can be quite unreliable, especially when you think about all new markets that informational technologies can open and that we can’t imagine at this moment. Nonetheless, I believe everyone can agree that demand for labor in this market can go only one way and that is UP!

There isn’t enough IT educated people

Unfortunately, most of the educational systems in the world can’t keep up with the fast-changing pace of IT and that is why proper education can’t really be gained in traditional ways. This is the reason why we are lacking skilled people with the right knowledge for all available job openings. That means that if you go for it and do your best to become a skilled coder, you will never be out of a job!

The knowledge stays relevant

Even if later in life you decide to start your own business, or try a slightly different career, the knowledge you gain stays relevant, especially when you think about the predictions that understanding code will be important for almost any future job. You will always understand ``programmers talk`` and be able to drop a few codes in your new company.

Working as a freelancer means working from home, like 99% of the time. How awesome is that? You don't have to worry about busy traffic, will it rain that day, did you forget to bring something, what will you wear, is that blue shirt clean? It gives you flexibility in work and the choice not many people have today. 

But there is one potential problem: You are your own boss! You are the one who controls the whole work process and when and how everything is done. I know, many of you will think: ``How can that be a problem? That's what I want!`` Problem occurs when you start lacking motivation and focus to be the most productive and amazing at what you do! That can happen from time to time to anyone, but it is especially issue for people working alone from home. That's why I gathered some motivational hacks and I honestly hope they will help you in everything you do. 

Now that you have started your career, presumably developed your skills, marketing and everything that goes into the package, it is time to see how to run your one-man show in the most productive way to save your time and money.  Check out the tools listed below, and let us know what you think: