About the program

Mission

Code with me's mission is to help journalists overcome their fear of code and use it to tell the stories they couldn't before. By pairing students with mentors we'll build self-supporting, local coding communities, and give our students the confidence and skills to teach themselves what they want to learn next.

2:1 ratio

We're extremely proud to say that every Code with me workshop has a 2:1 student-to-mentor ratio. It all goes back to why we do this in the first place: when we both started learning code, we had mentors when we really needed them, and we want to pass that experience on to as many journalists as possible.

All of our mentors are either journalists themselves, or interested in helping journalists. All of our mentors, just like the co-founders, are volunteers and donate their time to make Code with me a reality.

Curriculum

We offer our teaching material under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported, which means you can share and adapt our work, as long as you attribute Code with me, share your resulting work under the same license, and don't use it for commercial purposes. If you have a commercial project in mind, please contact us. We currently are not allowing third parties to use host workshops using the Code with me brand.

Why we do this

Both of us have been where the students are: wishing that someone would just sit down to code with us and help us learn. Luckily, we both found mentors who were generous with their time, and now we want to make sure other journalists struggling to learn these skills on their own find the mentors they're wishing for. While we do charge for the workshops, all the money goes towards improving the curriculum or helping cover operating costs. None of it goes to us, and we like keeping it that way.

Co-founders

Tom Giratikanon builds interactive graphics at The New York Times, and was a newsroom developer at The Boston Globe. He teaches programming to high school students each summer at the Medill School of Journalism.

Sisi Wei develops news applications at ProPublica. She has previously worked as a graphics editor at the Washington Post, and she has taught a one-week intensive workshop on data visualization at the University of British Columbia.