Thread by @championswimmer

It has been almost 7 years, I'm teaching people to code, make apps and websites.

It is interesting how a lot of movers and shakers in today's edtech ecosystem (esp in the programming space) can be traced back to one tiny office in Pitampura, New Delhi.

A thread 🧵👇🏼

Before me and Prateek, Coding Blocks originally was started by Ankush (who now runs Coding Ninjas) and Anushray (who later was CTO at CueMath for a long time)

Tushar used to teach there too, and went on to build Coding Ninja's initial tech stack and a lot of CampK12's product

When they left less than 2 years after starting it, virtually an empty office was left behind.

Along with Prateek and me, Priyanshu (now heads operations at Pesto) and Sumeet Bhaiya (who went on to create PepCoding) picked things up from scratch and started from 0 again.

In the journey, we were joined by Anuj (who runs CodeForCause). Kunal who started CfC with Anuj was one of my favourite students. In fact till today sometimes I feel I can hear Kunal furiously and noisily clicking-clacking away on his Macbook keyboard 🤭

Talking of students, Aman Dhattarwal (of Apni Kaksha fame) was Prateek's classroom student. He even made a video about Coding Blocks when he had <100K subs, long long back. Love Babbar too sat in Prateek's CB classroom, and was a WebDev student.

Fun fact: Nischay (famous as Triggered Insaan) was one of our first campus hires from IIIT after starting CB. Definitely among the first 5 people I've hired in my life. Within 3 months of working with us, he realised his calling for games and memes over teaching Python and iOS 😅

A lot of what forms Unacademy's coding wing - Sanket, Riya, Pulkit, Raj(Striver) were all either students or TAs or instructors at CB too.
Same with Coding Club's founding team of instructors - many my former students.

All in all, lots of YouTube millionaire (in subs and in $$$) once warmed chairs in the tiny CB Pitampura office 😋

Things often come full circle, as Varun who built CB's tech is looking after Scaler's product now, and Mudit who was running Coding Elements a stone's throw away from CB now is one message away on Scaler's slack channel :)

Behind the curtains, the world of edtech is very very small.
The only thing I look forward to in the next 5 years is for this pool of educators and business builders in this world to increase manifold. Because we need much more than the handful of us that are there today.

The tech world still complains about the lack of engineering talent, especially senior engineers. Which only means, there's so much more to do for all of us. It has only just begun.

P.S. Not tagging anyone or any org here as not sure who all might or might not want to be tagged on this. 😅

Originally posted this on LinkedIn
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