▶Teaching Kids to Code Changed How I Think About Software2025
A year co-founding Learn From Scratch taught me that the hardest part of programming isn't syntax — it's helping someone believe they can do it.
In May 2023 I co-founded Learn From Scratch, a program that guided 100 fourth through sixth graders through writing their first lines of code over four semesters. I expected to teach Python. I didn't expect it to reshape how I think about building software.
Most of those kids had never opened a code editor. The first day was chaos — every error message landed like a personal insult. But by week three something shifted. They stopped treating bugs as failures and started treating them as puzzles. That mental reframe is exactly what separates good engineers from stuck ones.
The experience reinforced something I carry into every project: software is only as good as the person it was built for. Watching a ten-year-old light up when their first loop ran correctly is a better benchmark for good UX than any design system I've read.