Programmers Guild will be hosting a series of training workshops throughout 2026 which focuses on training folk to BUILD SOMETHING. When we say SMASH, we mean that both developers and users of software must be the primary beneficiaries of its value. And that includes everything from well-paying careers to tech support for the everyday person. Quality software provides quality jobs and a quality experience. And we want YOU to BUILD IT.

ATTENTION: junior programmers and members of the community who want to GET GOOD. Online training starts this Summer, created to take your skills to the next level while connecting you with a community of peers and mentors! The importance of a nurturing community is the keystone to a long and successful career!

 You're coding and you finish a small but useful program... which turns out to be VERY useful. Which leads you to expand and improve its functionality over time. And as you continue to expand that code... you unexpectedly arrive in a place where it's difficult to work on it. You can't figure out why new bugs are popping up in code that used to work. It's difficult to think about how to add a new feature to the program -- so you carve out a new space and hastily wire it up into the old code! Now THAT rats nest of digital wires starts to haunt the code whenever you have to update it. Spaghetti.

And I'm here to tell you to eat that spaghetti. It's delicious. 

Think back to the era between roughly 1975-2000, a time when many of the most revered and celebrated software developers of today started their careers by teaching themselves to code. Wealthy companies hired these enthusiastic young programmers on nothing more than the word of a colleague. In the earliest days of the profession, everyone was self-taught and learned the details on-the-job. 

So what was the Learn to Code movement of the late 2000s even about if everyone was self-taught? It signified that people were no longer teaching themselves computer programming, because the web had changed how people used computers entirely. Nonetheless, you need a computer and broadband to even access the web. Not everyone got to participate in this movement. 

In this article, I'll discuss:

Formerly known as T3 Matchine!

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West Oakland Public Library and Programmers Guild host the Teen Tech Lab 2025!