“In Kenya, I learned the theory. At //kood, I learned to actually build software.”

Learning to slow down

In Kenya, Grace told us, software development often looks like this: “Business asks for a product, and they want it in a month or two. They don’t want you to waste time collecting data. They want you to jump to the solution.”

At //kood, Kaur asked them to do the opposite. For a full month, the three interns ran user interviews, sat in on student reviews, spoke with engineers and built nothing. “I was complaining. I told my lecturer back home that we were wasting time. But now, looking back, we haven’t had to go back and fix something we built wrong. That culture was completely new to me,” said Grace.

That shift from “ship and learn” to “learn, then ship” was, for all three of them, the most professionally formative moment of the internship. Not a technical skill but a way of thinking.

Learning to be trusted

The second shift was about how work itself is organised.

Gilbert came to Tallinn from a tech culture where seniority is visible - corner offices, hierarchy, presence often measured in hours at a desk. At //kood, he found something very different. “You can literally share a desk with your CEO. You feel like you’re all working towards the same thing. There’s no micromanagement but that also means the responsibility is yours,” Gilbert said.

For Jamie, the shift came through the work itself. After years of computer science theory at Strathmore and an internship that didn’t quite click, she finally got to build something end-to-end: backend, frontend, interaction design, storytelling. “It was just perfect. To apply what I was learning in school. There’s been so much learning,” said Jamie.

Learning what the work is for

There is a particular kind of confidence you don’t get from a classroom, the confidence of building something real, for real users. Jamie, Grace and Gilbert leave with that. A working prototype that will soon be used by hundreds of learners, not as an exercise, but as part of a real product.

But they also leave with something else: a clearer view of the gap between how they were trained and how they could work. “In public universities in Kenya, most of what we’re taught is not applicable in the job market. It’s a lot of theory. The degree didn’t fully meet my expectations. But I kept building on my own, hackathons, side projects, and communities. That’s where the real growth happened,” Gilbert commented.

That self-built layer - the hackathons, the side projects, the peer learning is exactly what //kood is designed to make part of the system itself. So the next generation doesn’t have to build it alone.

What happens next

kood/Nairobi piloted last year in Kenya, this year we’ll open our doors in partnership with Kenyatta University and supported by ESTDEV. Twelve students are already studying in Nairobi. Applications for the next cohort are opening soon. Check out koodkenya.tech

Gilbert summed it up best: “Kenyans are the most ambitious people out there. We have massive talent. If you show people what an opportunity actually looks like, what others have built, where it leads, they will go all the way. If //kood had found us in school, we’d have been first in line.”