Miale School

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

It is a new week, What did you build last week? What are you building this week? What is blocking you? #PotentialMonday

Let me tell you about the most expensive lie ever sold. It goes like this: Coding is a special talent reserved for a specific type of person. You either have "the knack" or you don't. This lie is whispered in school guidance counselors' offices. It is shouted from the rooftops of Silicon Valley prestige. It is encoded in hiring practices that demand computer science degrees for jobs that don't need them. And it has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps billions of people locked out of the most transformative skill of our era. Because the formal system fails so spectacularly, a new generation of African entrepreneurs, educators, and technologists is building alternatives. They are leapfrogging the factory floor. Look at Kenya’s School @MialeSchool. These are not traditional universities. They are “coding bootcamps” and tech talent accelerators that have an ironclad focus on industry-relevant skills. They don’t ask for your high school transcript. They ask to see if you can learn. They partner with global companies to place graduates directly into jobs. They are creating a new currency of competence that rivals the old currency of credentials.

@MialeSchool The real story isn't Tunde. It's the 12,000 drivers who trusted a guy with no degree. He didn't skip the degree, he just found a problem expensive enough to make it irrelevant.

Tunde launched a web platform connecting Lagos taxi drivers with mechanics. It has 12,000 users. He employs four developers. He never finished a computer science degree. He never took a bootcamp. He just decided to stop being a ghost in the machine.

Learning web dev will hurt. You will feel stupid. You will rage at a semicolon. You will question every life choice that led you to this moment. That is not a bug. That is a feature. The pain of learning to code is the pain of your brain rewiring itself.

@beyoumf Start before.

Pitch me your best advice in 2 words?

It is the ability to think in systems, to tolerate ambiguity, to break down reality into components and rebuild it according to your will.

We have watched a 14-year-old girl in rural Kenya deploy a web application that tracks livestock vaccination records for her entire village. What they all discovered is that web development is not a technical skill. It is a psychological transformation.

We have interviewed developers in Lagos who taught themselves to code on $40 Android phones. W have sat with former coal miners in Wales who rebuilt their identities through JavaScript.

In a continent of 1.4 billion people, the number of professional web developers hovers around 700,000. That means for every 2,000 Africans, there is one person who can build the digital world.

In 2024, there are 27 million software developers in the world. By 2030, that number will exceed 45 million. But here's the statistic that should terrify and excite you: less than 1% of the African continent's population can write even a single line of HTML.

Consider the story of Diego, a mechanic in Medellín, Colombia. Diego never finished high school. His teachers had written him off as “unteachable” because he couldn’t sit still. But Diego could take apart a motorcycle engine and put it back together with his eyes closed. When his neighborhood became a hub for tech startups, Diego saw an opportunity. He taught himself to repair the electric scooters and delivery drones that the startups used. He didn’t wait for a course on “Drone Maintenance” (none existed). He took one apart, figured it out, and built a business that now employs ten people. His mind had never been caged because he had never fully submitted to the cage.

That screen is a portal to everything, knowledge, money, love, war, truth, lies, freedom, and imprisonment. The average human being will spend 6,000 hours looking at screens this year. That's 250 full days. That's more time than you will spend eating, or exercising, combined.

The caged mind built by the education system manifests in adulthood as a paralyzing fear of self-direction. It’s why so many people, after finishing formal education, stop learning altogether. They wait for someone to give them a syllabus, a course, or a boss to tell them what to do next. It’s why the phrase “I don’t know” is often followed by silence, rather than “let me find out.” We have been conditioned to believe that “not knowing” is a shameful condition to be hidden, not a natural starting point for exploration. The caged mind also manifests as a deep fear of autonomy. When faced with a complex problem, the caged mind looks for a rulebook, an authority figure, a precedent. It is afraid to improvise. It is afraid to be wrong.