Younglings All Grown Up

I went into the Longkloof Barclays' Aliens office for the final time yesterday, since Alwyn was on holiday again today, to finalize my projects and say goodbye to my co-workers. I honestly feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to work at Aliens, as the internship really had the best of all worlds - an interesting project with huge potential to impact many people positively, cool colleagues, flexible hours, and of course, free lunch.

Here, I'm going to recap the work I did in the internship, similar to my post on RealWorld. As I said in my original post on Younglings a few weeks back, I was working on the "Youth Employment Pipeline project, designing and beginning to implement changes to the Younglings program that seeks to recruit teenagers interested in technology, particularly those outside of the formal education system, teach them how to code, and set them up with a job from which they can launch their career as a software engineer." My main goals were to "establish relationships and partnerships with boot camps and job placement companies around Cape Town from which to source students, develop a strong social media campaign to spread the word about Younglings to the world . . . and find innovative companies around Cape Town that would be willing and eager to hire graduates of the Younglings program." How did I do?

In the first week of the internship I started by making a Kanban board on Trello, to keep everything organized, and then dove in to tackling the first goal, forming partnerships with sources of students. I interviewed the current Younglings and made a Younglings pitch deck, researched various coding bootcamps and job matching platforms around Cape Town including RLabs, Harambee, CodeX, WeThinkCode, and Timu, and started reaching out to the people at these companies to set up meetings.

By the end of week 2 I had met with CodeX and RLabs, both of which were very eager to and excited about partnering with Barclays, and discovered that WeThinkCode has already committed to sending 5 of their graduates to Younglings. I would also later meet with Lebo Miya of the Ekasi Code Club. The meeting with Bronwyn from RLabs was especially remarkable. I Ubered out about 30 minutes to the RLabs headquarters in Bridgetown and talked Bronwyn and her colleague through the program, answering their questions and asking my own. After the meeting, Bronwyn gave me the full tour of the office, introducing me to each and every group and department as "Chris from California," which made their eyes light up. Then, Bronwyn wanted to take me to one of RLabs's Youth Cafes, places where young people can come to study, work, pitch their idea, or get a bite to eat using social currency they earn by doing good in their communities, so we got in their van and drove down the road to the cafe. I got a full tour there as well, and was offered to stay for the rest of the day, but I had to get back to the city, so Bronwyn settled for a hug instead. It was so cool seeing how passionate the people at RLabs are about their work, and how much of a positive impact they are having, first hand. 

I also started planning the social media campaign to let the world know about Younglings in the second week, and designed the mockup (using Balsamiq) and built the framework (using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node, Express, and Heroku) for the Younglings website, younglings.herokuapp.com. I've built several websites now, and it was cool how quickly I was able to get it up and running. 

I continued working on this social media campaign in week 3, and came up with a detailed, hour-by-hour posting schedule for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, as well as formats and dozens of example posts, and a hashtag (#Younglings101). You can see the whole campaign here. I also wrote questions for the Younglings testimonial video, and filmed the current class of Younglings talking about their backgrounds and experiences in the program. After getting access to a computer with a modern edition of iMovie (my iMovie '09 wasn't cutting it), I was able to edit the videos, add music and intro and outro clips I made in a software called Blender, and bring the testimonial idea I had to life!

Finally, in week 4, I worked on the Younglings site, with help from Liza, the UX intern, and Phill, the Web Dev intern, and we got in done just in time to show Alwyn on Thursday. I am very happy with the final product, as I think the design looks clean and professional, and I was able to get the main functionality working, embedding all the social media posts onto the site using APIs. Check it out at younglings.herokuapp.com! Also make sure to check out the testimonial video on the front page!

I was excited to really present all of the work I had done to Alwyn, but again, something came up and he had to leave earlier than expected. I'm still proud of the work I put in and the deliverables we got out, and I think that Alwyn is pretty pleased with it as well. So what did I do today with my off day? Hiked Skeleton Gorge!