February 28, 2015
Da’Jour Nash of West Philadelphia, 17, is a student at Latin Charter High School - and a talented web developer.
And now he is putting his coding skills to use in the workplace.
Involved in Coded by Kids since it began offering classes to teens in October, Da'Jour is the first student from the program to be offered an internship at a professional organization. He works with VUID Inc., a technology start-up and creator of the Spotlight app, two days per week after school, and focus on building websites and apps.
"We are delighted to welcome Da'Jour to VUID," said Kevin Brophy, CEO. "It's so important to recognize talent and potential in our youth, and encourage them to develop their skills, especially within the technology field. We're at a critical time where experts are predicting an extreme shortage of technical professionals who will be qualified to fill essential jobs in the ever-growing tech industry over the next decade."
Coded By Kids is a nonprofit that teaches disadvantaged, urban children the skills they need to work in STEM-related fields.
Da'Jour started learning programming when one of the IT employees at his high school loaned him an HTML book.
Sylvester Mobley, founder of Coded By Kids, said the teen has an intense curiosity and passion for programming — something that probably means he’s going to become very good at it.
“One thing that makes good developers good developers is they’re always working on projects,” Mobley said. “Da’Jour has that attitude [and] mindset. He’s always working on projects.”
Mobley said he helps guide Nash toward projects that may further develop his skill set, but for the most part Nash is choosing to do extra projects because it’s fun.
“For him it doesn’t seem like work,” Mobley said. “This is something that Da’Jour truly has a passion for, which is one of the reasons he excels at it the way he does. He’s all in.”
Meanwhile, Nash has been an intern for VUID — Virtual Unique IDs — since Jan. 21. His internship concludes in May.
VUID created the Spotlight app, which allows users to share original content with the goal of getting paid to do so. Users with the most likes receive a cash prize.
Nash is working on programming a number of landing pages and adding contest instructions at the company.
VUID front-end developer Kelly Hilliard said she would have loved to be able to get the real-life programming experience Nash gets at his internship.
“I would have loved to have this opportunity in high school,” Hilliard said. “I didn’t get a lot of tech education in high school.”
And Nash, she said, has fully been taking advantage of this opportunity.
"He’s not used to working on the bigger code base," Hilliard said. "It’s kind of cool and it brings you some prospective."
