Techstarta

Why

I got into this industry on the back of people who gave me time they didn’t owe me. A senior engineer who read my code properly instead of skimming it. Someone who told me what the job actually looked like before I had one.

Years later, in Lagos, I kept meeting people who had none of that. The gap was never talent or willingness — there was plenty of both. It was experience, and the way the industry had arranged itself so that no one would be the first to hand it over. Every junior role wanted someone who had already done the work. Courses taught syntax and stopped at the point where the interesting problems start: an ambiguous brief, a codebase you didn’t write, someone senior telling you your first approach won’t hold.

So the question I was actually trying to answer was narrow: how does someone get real experience before anyone will give them a job that provides it?

What it was

It started as Frintern — a free career accelerator for people breaking into tech — and became Techstarta.

The core of it was challenges rather than lessons. Briefs written the way work arrives: a problem, some constraints, no step-by-step. You built something, submitted it, and a working professional reviewed it and told you where it fell short and why. That review was the whole product. The learning material around it existed to get you to the point where you could attempt the brief.

It ran across five tracks — backend, frontend, product design, product management, data analytics — because the same gap exists on every side of a product team, not just in engineering. And it was free, which shaped every decision after it.

The other half was the mentors. Getting people to volunteer their evenings turned out to be less about persuasion than about lowering the cost: a mentor who has to design a curriculum will say no; a mentor who has to review one submission and be honest about it will usually say yes.

The impact

People used it to build the portfolio that got them their first interview, and a good number of them got the job. Mentors discovered they liked the reviewing more than they expected — several kept mentoring long after the platform stopped being the reason. And a community formed around it that outlived the product, which is the part I hadn’t planned for and would most want to repeat.

What I learned running it: distribution is harder than the build, by a distance. The platform was the easy half. Reaching the people who needed it, and keeping mentors engaged month after month without paying them, was the actual work — and it never stopped being the actual work.

Where it is now

The domain has lapsed and I stopped running it. Some of that was capacity; most of it was realising I could do the same thing more directly. Mentoring the engineers on my team, building someone’s promotion case, sitting in a design review with someone who’s nervous about presenting — that’s the same work at a smaller scale, and it lands harder.

The curated learning paths are still public at github.com/techstarta, tracks and all. If you want to add to them, the pull request will get read.