At Grabyo we believe diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) should be at the heart of any tech organization looking to make a tangible impact in any industry. Within our business operations, sales, marketing and engineering team, we’ve seen firsthand how a diverse range of backgrounds and opinions creates a highly collaborative, high-performing and close-knit culture. 

Like many others, Grabyo has taken tangible steps towards creating an inclusive environment and we are working to continually improve, both within our workforce and the wider community. 

As part of this mission, we’re proud to be a partner of codebar, which is a global community dedicated to empowering minority group individuals to learn programming and expand their career opportunities – making technology and coding more accessible.  

What is codebar?

Founded in 2013 on the belief that everyone should have the opportunity to learn and excel in programming, codebar aims to address the tech industry’s diversity gap by offering a supportive and inclusive learning environment for people at many stages of their careers and lives. 

Codebar provides free coding workshops and mentoring to underrepresented groups in tech, including women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people from underrepresented ethnic groups, people with disabilities and individuals from low-income backgrounds. 

As well as their workshops they manage a network to connect companies with untapped, underrepresented tech talent and run a schedule of events throughout the year, including the annual codebar festival and uncodebar conference. 

For more information about codebar’s impact, the work they do and the people they work with, check out their recently published 2023 impact report.

codebar Workshops

We’ve been avid supporters of codebar for a few years now. The main way we contribute as a company is by regularly hosting codebar workshops – one of the more direct and impactful ways to get involved. 

We provide a welcoming office space, WiFi, food and refreshments so the volunteer coaches and eager students can collaborate, teach and learn. 

I’d encourage any business that can get involved to do so – it’s a relatively small commitment that provides a great deal of value to codebar, its students and the wider tech community.

On an individual level, the team at Grabyo gets involved in many different ways – while my only experience with coding is designing my MySpace page in the mid-2000s, I help with the organization and facilitation of the workshops, organizing the space, food and refreshments for the attendees. 

Many of Grabyo’s engineers, who specialize in various disciplines across front-end, back-end and full-stack also volunteer as coaches at the workshops – working closely with the students to carry out codebar’s mission.

The workshop itself starts off with networking (and often pizza!) as students, coaches and codebar’s organizers arrive. It’s a great opportunity to meet and mingle with a warm and friendly crowd of people interested in tech, coding and de&i. 

The students and coaches are then paired by discipline or type of coding, before they spend the rest of the workshop collaborating, learning and being guided by their coaches and, as per codebar’s mission, upskilling people who are generally underrepresented in tech. 

Impact

Hosting codebar workshops has a profound impact on students and coaches. For students, the workshops provide a valuable opportunity to develop their skills, network, and gain confidence in their abilities in a safe environment.

For those who volunteer as coaches, participating in workshops is a rewarding experience that allows them to give back to the tech community while developing their leadership, mentoring and communication skills. By helping aspiring developers, volunteers have an amazing impact in nurturing the next generation of tech talent and creating a more inclusive industry.

Get involved

There are countless ways to get involved with codebar – whether you’re a new, aspiring coder who would like to sign up as a student, a tech professional who wants to volunteer at their workshops, or a business that has the capacity to host workshops or one of their events. 

As well as workshops and volunteering, there are also countless opportunities to get involved with codebar events and festivals they run throughout the year. 

Check out the codebar website for information on how to get involved and read about some of the amazing work they do. 

With over 18,000 students and 6,500 coaches in 33 chapters worldwide, codebar has a huge impact on the tech community and is an incredible organization to be involved with.