Code as a second chance: GitHub sponsors HackYourFuture
GitHub has announced its sponsorship of HackYourFuture, a not-for-profit coding school based in Amsterdam that trains refugees and people with limited access to education for careers in web development. The company’s Amsterdam office has a direct tie to the organization: several Hubbers already volunteer there, teaching and mentoring students.
The partnership comes with a promotional campaign designed by 72andSunny called Behind the Source. It tells the stories of seven HackYourFuture graduates, all of whom came to the Netherlands as refugees and have since built careers as developers — in several cases, working on widely used websites and applications.
Portraits hidden in production code
The campaign puts a literal spin on its title. Each graduate’s portrait is hidden in the source code of a website belonging to the company where they now work. The participating employers include eBay, Accenture, Backbase, Exact, Marktplaats, and Zivver. Visitors to those sites who inspect the source code will find the portraits, each built entirely out of code.
The intent is to reframe the conversation about refugees and the contributions they make to the countries where they settle. By embedding the portraits in the code of these companies’ sites, the campaign celebrates the graduates’ technical achievements and demonstrates, in a direct way, that code can open doors — crossing borders and changing lives.
The seven-month path to a developer job
HackYourFuture runs a seven-month web-development course. Its results, as cited by GitHub, are notable: 120 graduates have found work in the Netherlands, and more than 200 have done so globally. In the Netherlands, over 85 percent of graduates secure and keep a high-quality developer position after finishing the program.
The curriculum is designed to give newcomers a significant employment advantage while also helping to fill the industry’s demand for qualified developers. Beyond technical training, students receive CV guidance and interview preparation, and HackYourFuture works directly with partner companies to facilitate hiring. The Behind the Source campaign is intended to highlight those successes and, in doing so, encourage more companies to meet and hire the program’s graduates.
