Code Clan Nigeria’s Year in Review 2020

When we started out in 2020, the plan was to reiterate and implement our goals and the reasons why we started Code Clan Nigeria which is simple: Turn 500+ people into developers every 3 months.

By that goal, the aim was to turn 2000+ people into developers at the end of 2020.

“Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much” — Helen Keller

To achieve our goal, we had a 3-part plan:

• Empower community members with technical skills using mentorships.
• Launch chapters in multiple cities in Nigeria.
• Connect community members with job opportunities.

Did we reach the goal? Let’s find out.

Overview

Code Clan Nigeria was created by Ajiboye Temitope on 28/12/2018. 2 years after, we have built a Telegram community of 750 members, a Slack community of 579 folks and a Meetup group of 693 members where we have created over 10 events to improve our member’s technical skills.

The core of our community is to provide mentorships to newbie developers and in turn, they become mentors themselves after going through a Tech track. Equipped with the strategy, we started the year.

January — April 2020

Since the core function of our community is mentorship, we started the year with the first mentorship of the year. This was supposedly supposed to run for 3 months but got extended to 4 months. We ran a single-track mentorship which was in Frontend because of the limited resources we had. In total, we had 13 mentors who completed the mentorship and they became mentors themselves.

May — August 2020

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus, we re-imagined the way to run our mentorships while taking cues from the first mentorship of the year. If we are going to be turning newbies to developers and then to mentors, we would need a portal that will bring them together and automate the bulk of the processing. Imagine a portal where a newbie enrols on then get matched with a mentor immediately. With this in mind, we set out to build out community portal with the amazing mentees that we had mentored the first year. This gave birth to our mentorship platform on www.codeclannigeria.dev. You can take a look at the wonderful people that made this happen here.

Additionally, we ran bootcamps to teach people skills doing this period. An example of such event can be found here.

This was our first ever 3-day bootcamp and we amazingly saw 80+ enrollment for this event.

We started #codeclassSaturdays during this period as well. Code class saturdays is a weekly tutorial class tailored to beginners. The classes are intended to bring everyone together to learn together. We created these events on our Meetup group. We started with classes in Javascript and then we added Flutter to the mix.

code class saturdays images

On Monday, August 24th, we launched our mentorship portal with a launch party. A lot of our mentees loved the idea. We had over 100 enrollments the first day of launch. You can find the launch party video here.

September — December 2020

During this period, hmm, a lot of things went wrong. We had a lot of problems we did not anticipate when building the portal and so, although we had a lot of enrollments, we ran into several problems which made it difficult for mentees to get mentored properly. It took a month of intense work to make the portal stable and by the time it was stable, a lot of our mentees were already exhausted and left. We learnt a huge lesson. Thankfully, these lesson made us improve and change the dynamics of how we deliver mentorships in 2021 and in future.

To test our theory, we launch a mini 4-weeks Flutter Mentorship track which saw over 30 people enroll. The positive engagement and response we got meant that we finally cracked the way to do mentorship.

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” — Aristole

The Positives

Asides the numerous negatives, we had matching positives as well which gives a hope of a better 2021.

We had 347 enrollments on the portal which means, we have been able to touch 347 lives in 2020.

Podcast

Our Podcast on Code Clan Nigeria Podcast where we interview budding developers has listeners in 35+ countries alone this year with Nigeria and the United States topping the list.

• 5 episodes
• 10 listening platform
• Most listen: https://anchor.fm/codeclanpodcast/episodes/The-Student-Pharmacist-and-a-UIUX-Designer-Alter-Ego-ejp7cc

Listen to our episodes here: https://anchor.fm/codeclanpodcast

Newsletter

We started an official newsletter — a weekly newsletter that keep the community updated on happenings in the tech world and also to motivate.

• 4 newsletters
• 400 subscribers

Most read newletter this year: https://codeclannigeria.substack.com/p/why-do-i-feel-so-weak

Subcribe to our newsletter: https://codeclannigeria.substack.com/

Thanks to our Newsletter editor for an all year commitment and dedication: Jennifer Oluchi Ofordile which also doubles as our Social Media Team lead.

Structure

As part of revamping, we set out to resturcture the administration in November. We carefully identified the needs of the community and appointed leads over each section of the community.

Plans for 2021?

• We are going to 2021 stronger than we have ever been. Armed with the lessons of 2020, we with run the mentorships smoothly, increase enrollments and reduce dropoffs.
• We also plan to hold our first ever Meetup in 2021 — the aim is to connect, give newbies speaking opportunities and to allow employers connect with our ever growing mentees who have learnt technical skills.
• Expand the community by creating clan in multiple cities. We will start with 1 and expand exponentially.
• Create impactful programs to further benefit our members.
• Connect special talented mentees with companies who need their skills. We are adding a job pipeline.

Sponsorship

Without money, we cannot run effectively. We need funds to run our planned activities, our community leads are just passionate folks who give their time and money to discover talents.

Send us an email at codeclannigeria@gmail.com if you want to sponsor Code Clan Nigeria, either as an individual or a company.

To learn more about Code Clan Nigeria, our programs and initiatives, you can visit www.codeclannigeria.dev or send us a mail at codeclannigeria@gmail.com

A special thanks to the Code Clan Nigeria team leads for their tremendous help in 2020.

You can find the team list here: www.codeclannigeria.dev/team