At a family center in downtown Oakland, 11 students are training with two lecturers and two teaching assistants. Toys are strewn on the floor; the school, called AnnieCannons, offers childcare onsite. For the first six weeks, students spin up on basic digital literacy, then they spend up to six months learning programming languages—JavaScript, HTML, CSS—at times working on clients’ projects. The coders are also encouraged to pitch products of their own, and they often come up with ones to help victims of abuse and exploitation. Coding is about identifying problems and finding solutions, says Jessica Hubley, one of the founders of AnnieCannons, a nonprofit that teaches coding to survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence, and that is something these students have had a lot of experience doing.
Rev tells me she’s worked on CSS animation, CLI GIFs, and a handful of other tech for clients: “DQaaS—data qualit