Seven

What a title.

Today is the seventh day of the seventh month, which so happens to be the date that I celebrate the day that I was born, some twenty seven years ago now. It is also the date that my baby brother, Dan, was born. I find that quite interesting because, what are the odds.

Today also marks the end of three months since I joined GOMYCODE Kenya as a full stack software development instructor on eighth April.

Some time in the eighth month of last year, I came across this company on social media that was expanding into Kenya, after having found success in eight (seeing a pattern here?) other countries. So I did what anyone does when they want to learn more about something that they like: I went onto Google. And I fell in love. With their people, with their spaces and most importantly, with their mission.

You see, over the years, since my days in university, I have always had a thing for tutoring others on software development. Both online and offline, most of which I've done for free.

Before I joined university in twenty seventeen, I had been coding (albeit on and off) for almost one year, and so in most classes, I knew a thing or two more than most of my classmates. That made me the go-to guy for coding related queries.

Sometimes, the lecturers would have me teaching the entire class certain topics when they were either running late, or just wanted the students to get a different perspective.

My friend Kevine solving a question I'd asked during an OOP with Java lecture. This moment was immortalized by my buddy Steve, who sneakily took his phone out and captured it.

When it was project time, many a days we'd stay back in school as a group because my friends needed my help with their projects. I vividly remember a day that a group of us left well past midnight, after all indoor areas of the university had been locked up, which meant that we had to sit on the benches outside the students' center, out in the cold. But we were all okay with it. The projects needed to be completed after all. It was worth it, because when the results came, they'd all done exceptionally well.

Fast forward a couple of years later, and my friend Kevine, while giving a speech during her Computer Science graduation party on seventh October 2022, said something that will forever be engrained in my memory: that it is through the mentorship that she'd got from me in her first year of learning to code that she was where she was.

Have you ever been hit by a flood of emotions that you momentarily lose touch with your senses? That was me for a good minute that day. Those words meant a whole lot to me.

Kevine and I during her graduation party.

And so you can already imagine how ecstatic I was when later, I saw that GOMYCODE, the company whose mission is to democratize education by empowering technology enthusiasts to learn tech skills, was hiring instructors. I immediately set up my email mark@kram.codes, polished my resume and sent in my application, praying for the best.

Response to my application to GOMYCODE

Every day after that, I woke up and first thing I did was refresh my email. Two days turned to four, four turned to seven, and on the eighth day, I was done refreshing my email because they'd stated that no response within the first seven days meant they would not be going ahead with my application.

I was devasted. Not angry, just sad that something I'd wanted so much had not come to pass. I however had another application that I had sent in for a remote engineer role with Mastercard through Andela, and that seemed promising. So I simply directed my full attention to that. Unfortunately, I performed poorly in my final live technical interview, and ended up losing out on that too, which was totally my fault for not being better prepared.

Oh well, anyone who's been in the industry long enough knows that's the nature of the game. You lose most, but all you need is one win.

And so I carried on with my life, but never forgetting about GOMYCODE. I kept up with their updates through social media, because I loved everything that they stand for. It is actually through these updates that I connected with a girl who'd later become my (now ex unfortunately) girlfriend. (Story for another day. Or maybe not. Idk.)

Fast forward seven months later, in March this year, and I got an email from none other than the Hackerspace Manager for GOMYCODE Kenya, asking if I was still interested in exploring a role with them. Ecstatic is an understatement of how I felt.

GOMYCODE interview invite email

Yes, of course I was still interested! We scheduled a meeting, and the rest, as they say, is history.

You might probably be wondering what all this has to do with my birthday. Well, it is customary to silently make a wish to the stars on one's birthday. I will not be making mine only silently to the stars today, instead choosing to make it here as well.

My wish for my twenty seventh birthday is that my current seventeen padawans (aka students, incase familiar with the Force you are not) at GOMYCODE, and all who will come after them, will have the same thing to say about my mentorship that Kevine did, when after they are done with their course, they go out there and change their lives with a thriving career in tech.

Frank, Flavian, John, Claire, Joyce, Ahmed, James N, Julia, James K, Ian, Judy, Valentine, Maurice, Susan, Stanley, Huda, James W: may you all find success in this journey that you have chosen.

And to my baby brother Dan, who may or may not read this: happy birthday buddy. Can't wait to have you join me in tech some day, should you choose to.