VOICES
Interview
Amina Adewusi was living her dream.
As an independent investment
analyst working across sub-Saharan
Africa, she travelled frequently. When she
and her husband decided to start a family,
Adewusi remained optimistic that she
could continue that work. But soon after
becoming a mother at the end of 2017, the
reality hit that her lifestyle wasn’t
sustainable. Her baby needed a lot of her
attention and energy. Accepting that she
had to find a job that allowed her more
flexibility, Adewusi googled ‘work from
home’ and discovered that 80 per cent of
the jobs that looked attractive to her were
for software engineers. Adewusi, however,
had no development experience.
She began researching coding
bootcamps and found a lot in her
hometown of London but they weren’t
accessible to her. “My son was still very
young and I wasn’t getting any sleep,”
Adewusi remembers. “So the thought ofgoing to a bootcamp Monday to Friday,
nine to five, was absolutely impossible.
Nevertheless I’m still really grateful that
bootcamps exist because I benefited from
their positive marketing material. It made
me believe that I could do it. I chose to
start learning Ruby as my first
programming language because one of
the bootcamps was advising it and had
some materials on their website. I believe
as long as you learn one language you can
transpose that knowledge into others.”
While bootcamps can be a good entry
route for some people, Adewusi warns of
their limitations. “I advocate for
companies to not just focus all their
hiring of junior developers on
bootcamps,” she explains. “Some
companies actually ring-fence budget
just for a certain bootcamp and they think
that’s their answer to diversity.
Bootcamps can also be very expensive
and the pace can be very fast, which maymake it difficult to absorb all the
information. There are big questions
around the effectiveness of the education
you get from some of the bootcamps as
well – check out the bad practices
uncovered by Keziyah Lewis (https://netm.
ag/2vD5lXD), for example – but [on the
plus side] they connect you to employers,
which is what I struggled with.”
The only software engineer Adewusi
knew was someone she met during a
school trip to Jordan. She hadn’t spoken
to him in 10 years but contacted him on
LinkedIn. As well as giving her some tips,
he connected her to a mother on his team.
Adewusi then used LinkedIn to search for
people who had done bootcamps that she
was interested in and asked them for
feedback on her ideas. She spoke to at
least 30 developers.
“It was phenomenal; everyone was
super helpful,” Adewusi recalls. “Some
people got back to me within minutes
and what was really shocking to me was
that everybody had something different
to say. I thought that after a few phone
calls, I would start getting the same
advice but it just didn’t happen. That has
really continued until today. No matter
who I reach out to, I tend to learn
something new.”
The suggestions ranged from following
tutorials and taking part in coding
challenges to joining communities both
offline, such as Code First: Girls (www.
codefirstgirls.org.uk), and online, such as
Slack and Gitter (gitter.im). Adewusi tried
everything. Setting up a GitHub account
and contributing to open-source projects,
even before she could write a line of code,
turned out to be an especially important
part of her self-teaching process.
“I found two repos that interested me
and I was just captivated. People all over
the world are giving their free time to work
together and build something. And so
many projects are trying to make this
world a better place or just improve access
to information. I was struck by how kind
the maintainers were to me. I made so
many mistakes, I didn’t know anything
but they would respond to my questions
with annotated images to help teach me.
One of my main mentors paired with mePhot
o:^Tom
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