GoKawiilHi everyone!
I've spent the last 2 years building out Jiki, starting with an idea, running a bootcamp to test my thinking, and then building out a (what I hope is kickass) product with Aron and Nicole.
I wanted to tell you about the journey. Why Jiki exists, why we invested our time and energy into it, and where I hope it will lead.
Before Jiki, there was Exercism
For those who don't know, I've spent the last decade building Exercism. Exercism is a platform that helps developers deepen their skills and learn new programming languages. It's been a huge collaborative effort with thousands of people committing code, hundreds of maintainers building out language tracks, and thousands of mentors supporting other developers. Millions of people have used it to level up their coding, and it's something I'm really proud of.
But while Exercism was designed for developers who already know how to code, we kept attracting total beginners. In fact, at last count, over 500 people a day are signing up to Exercism who've never written a line of code before. And Exercism really doesn't work for them as it wasn't built for them, so we send them away.
And that sucks.
My motivation with Exercism has always been about social mobility - helping people who need that help the most. I believe that programming is a core skill that almost everyone should learn. For some it can be a career, but for everyone it teaches critical thinking, problem solving, and gives you a skillset that helps in almost any digital work. In short, I believe programming genuinely changes lives and opens doors that might otherwise stay closed. So watching these beginners arrive, full of enthusiasm, and then having to tell them "sorry, this isn't for you yet" felt like a failure on my part.
I started exploring the "learn to code" landscape to understand what was out there for them. I talked to lots of the beginners signing up and started to explore the resources out there. And as I tried those resources, I realised something was missing. Most of them don't get to the heart of what I believe programming actually is: fun problem solving.
Instead, they give you videos to watch, quizzes to take, maybe a little coding exercise, and a certificate at the end. They teach you syntax and theory, but they don't really get you making things. And I think that's why so many people give up. It's not that coding is too hard - it's that the way they're being taught doesn't feel like coding at all.
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