Coding Black Females: the positive impact of community

Coding Black Females has reached thousands of women since its inception in 2017 through its online courses, boot camps, mentoring scheme and events, with far-reaching impact on the tech community and people’s lives. This article is based on an interview with its founder.

Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about Coding Black Females?

I am Charlene Hunter and I'm the founder and CEO of Coding Black Females, a non-profit that kicked off back in 2017. We wanted to create a space for black women in tech to come together, which was something that I needed at that stage of my career. Now we've expanded and we do boot camps, mental programmes and events, and we're starting to do some software development as well.

What was the catalyst for starting Coding Black Females?

It was back in 2017. I had just watched Hidden Figures and I was extremely inspired by that. It had been in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what yet, and it inspired me to create a community. The second catalyst was that after [a successful funding bid] in 2019, we started delivering boot camps and I was working every single hour possible to make sure that the course would work, but also still working my day job, and something had to give. So that's when myself and a few other people started working on [Coding Black Females] full time, and in 2021 we started doing more and delivering more initiatives.

Why coding — why not accountancy or architectural law? What's so special about coding in terms of its ability to elevate people?

My background is in software engineering, I'm a developer — if I was an accountant, maybe this would be a community for accountants. But as a software engineer, that's what I wanted to start. What became really clear was the power of tech communities — the way they work together, share ideas, share experiences. They really try to empower their people, which I don't see elsewhere in the same way. It’s having people work together to develop new ideas and skills, and coding works really well at that. Then there’s the idea that people can do it anywhere — there's no limitations. People can be all over the globe, and work on a project for somebody on the other side of the world; that’s really powerful and you can’t do that in the same way in other industries. For example, if you're an accountant in the UK, those laws don't apply in the US, and so on. Tech is relatively universal.

Where do you sit on the ‘AI will write all the code we need’ debate?

AI is already writing systems for us, so that's already happening. What I do believe is that you still need people to make sure that it's correct.

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We’re seeing a lot of organisations hiring for more experienced skills accompanied by the knowledge of AI tools so that they can get that balance right. It's really important that we understand that while AI can write something for us, it may have problems — it’s with existing knowledge and experience that people can build on it to make a much better system. And not all systems that we're building are brand new systems; we also have legacy applications out there which need to be supported and maintained. While AI can probably do some of it, some of that existing knowledge that people have of how something was put together in the first place can be really, really valuable.

Where and how are you using AI within your courses?

Everywhere I would say, and we are assessing people utilising AI. We keep people in the loop though — if we are using AI, there are still people who are checking that we're getting the right outputs and that there's no unexpected bias in there.

We've also incorporated AI or generative AI as a topic into all of our courses now, so that anybody who is learning will know how to utilise it alongside coding. They’re skills that can go hand in hand — they sit together, not apart. We also understood that people are going to use it anyway, so [we’ve tackled that by] encouraging people to utilise generative AI but also to explain how they've used it and what they learned when they did.

In the content world we have a lot of constant debate about using AI, but you're talking about kind of reflective use. Tell us more about that idea.

When [generative AI] first came out, we realised people weren’t copying and pasting. They were using it to learn and then using that to answer questions, which is actually a really good use of AI. So we thought actually, let's encourage it — or at least not ban it — and ask how people are using it instead so that we can encourage that use.
I use [AI] myself when I'm building systems. I don't know everything, and I can't go to Google all the time, [so I use AI] but I make sure that I understand what I've learned from it because otherwise I'll struggle to learn in the future. I think it's actually really important, because new technologies will come out and they're not all going to be AI based. People are still going to need to know how to understand different concepts. And [using it reflectively is] a really good way of making sure that you maintain and retain some of that information.

How do you see the skills landscape evolving over the next five to 10 years?

If you asked me that question five or 10 years ago, my answer would have been more solid and based on technologies that were coming out — but at the moment, everything is moving so quickly. What we're encouraging people to do is learn and be ready to be uncomfortable. We're trying to teach that mindset instead of ‘these are the exact skills you need and that will set you up in the right place for the next 10 years of your career’, because it's just not true anymore. You've got to be comfortable with the fact that you will be learning all the time and that actually takes you a lot further.

What stories make you the proudest about Coding Black Females?

When I started wanting to teach people how to code or how to work within the industry, from my perspective it was about teaching new skills and changing representation and that was it. But it impacts people in ways that I hadn't expected. We started seeing people who were able to move house and live in areas that they preferred to live for their children, or find their children getting into technology as well because they've seen their mothers learning how to code every night. The other really good outcome that we see is people setting up their own communities, like people that set up their own Web 3 organisations to teach children. It’s incredible… because it means that we're actually expanding the community and making sure that more people can develop and gather skills.

What sort of feedback do you get? What are the more unexpected benefits people gain?

The side benefits are definitely that people's confidence increases because something like coding is seen as a skill that's relatively hard, so when people realise that they can do it too, their confidence naturally increases. Collaboration is another one that naturally comes out; typically people work in teams when they're training with us, and it comes out just through being in the community as well — and there's that general power of being in a community, working together, developing a whole bunch of skills from other members that they wouldn't necessarily experience otherwise.

What do you say to a business or an employer thinking about getting involved with CBF? What are the benefits?

It depends. Some companies really benefit through us by hiring, so they'll work with us to see some fantastic people trained up. The other side is retention and support of existing employees. We see a lot of organisations who enable their staff to do volunteering with us and through that those staff then gain confidence in their own skills and stay longer because they're contributing more than what they're working on in their day job, and also getting promoted and moving up in their own careers. So that's a huge power for those organisations as well.