Tech
The Code Must Go On: An Afghan Coding Bootcamp Becomes a Lifeline Under Taliban Rule
Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine.
In his hometown in Afghanistan’s northern Samangan province, the former computer science student started and ended each day glued to his laptop screen.
Since late October, Asadullah had been participating in a virtual coding bootcamp organized by Code Weekend, a volunteer-run community of Afghan tech enthusiasts, with content donated by Scrimba, a Norwegian company that offers online programming workshops.
On some days, Asadullah took a screen break for a game of pickup soccer, but generally he didn’t see his friends that much anymore. Under the Taliban regime, “old friends are getting so depressed,” he explains, and there was only so much of that he could handle. Instead, he tells me, “my life is on my computer.”
Asadullah is one of the millions of young Afghans whose lives, and plans for the future, were turned upside down when the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan last August. When the capital fell, Asadullah had two semesters of college left, and he was thinking about his post-graduation plans. He wasn’t picky about his first job; anything that let him save up some money would do. But he had bigger plans: Asadullah wanted to start his own software company and share his love of computer science by teaching university and high school students. “When I start coding, I can forget everything,” he says.
Today, those plans are on pause—and no one knows for how long. The country’s economy is in free fall, the United Nations warns of famine, and in the meantime, Afghanistan’s new rulers have offered little by way of solutions to its citizens.
In such dire circumstances, a coding bootcamp—a remnant of a brief period of techno-optimism in Afghanistan—may seem out of place. But for its participants, it offers hope of a better future—though whether such a future is still possible in Afghanistan remains to be seen.
Virtual learning
When the Taliban swept into power in August, it was unclear what their rule would mean for the Internet in Afghanistan. Would they cut off Internet access? Use social media posts—or government databases—to identify and target their former enemies? Continue to wage their own increasingly effective public affairs campaigns?
As it turned out, the Taliban did not cut off access to the Internet—at least it has not yet. Instead, for those Afghan students who can afford the Internet at home—especially women and girls, whom the regime has officially banned from secondary and higher education—online learning has become one of the primary sources of education.
Some of this is well organized, with encrypted virtual classrooms set up by international supporters, while some is entirely self-directed—learning through YouTube videos, perhaps, or playlists of TED talks. And often it falls somewhere in between, making use of free or discounted online learning platforms.
Code Weekend’s virtual bootcamp falls into this latter category. Seventy-five participants were accepted into the cohort and are working their way through Scrimba’s Frontend Developer Career Path, a series of 13 interactive video learning modules that cover everything from HTML and CSS basics to tips on handling job interview questions about JavaScript or GitHub.
Participants can complete the modules on their own time and in their own homes, with Code Weekend volunteer mentors checking in weekly to answer questions, ensure that they stay on track, and assist with logistics as needed—including providing Internet top-up to keep participants online. According to organizers, roughly 50 members of the original cohort are active.
Ensuring Internet connectivity is just one of the logistical and financial challenges of running a bootcamp, even a virtual one, in Afghanistan. Another is contending with power outages, which become more frequent every winter. In an attempt to solve both these problems, Code Weekend has been trying to crowdfund the costs of 3G credit and backup electricity through generators and battery storage units.
But there’s another issue that worries organizers: “what the Taliban think,” says Jamshid Hashimi, the software engineer who started Code Weekend with friends seven years ago. The group doesn’t want to find out. “So far, we avoided interactions with them,” he says.
In a way, the bootcamp’s virtual, asynchronous format helps Code Weekend stay under the radar. It makes it far easier for women, whose freedom of movement has been drastically curtailed under the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam, to participate without leaving their homes—or even interacting with male participants, which might also provoke the Taliban’s ire.
Zarifa Sherzoy, 19, is one of the boot camp’s female participants. A recent high school graduate, she had hoped to be taking college entrance exams and starting university classes this semester, but instead, she and her seven siblings spend most of their days at home. Between household chores, power outages, and her limited access to the Internet, she spends just an hour or two on the coding bootcamp. But still, even this has provided a new structure and meaning to her days. “After the Taliban arrived,” she recalls being “very tired at home every day thinking about how to end this.” But since the coding bootcamp started in late October, she says, while her problems haven’t disappeared, “my days are good.”
The virtual format has another added perk: it allows coders outside the Afghan capital, like Asad Asadullah, to participate.
Code Weekend Bootcamp
When Jamshid Hashimi, then a 23-year-old software architect at the homegrown Afghan tech company Netlinks, launched Code Weekend in June 2014 to bring together Afghan programmers, he was inspired by the techno-optimism that then permeated Kabul.
A Fast Company profile on the country’s burgeoning startup scene, published in 2012, described the pervasive hopefulness this way: “Impossibly optimistic and totally obsessed, Afghanistan’s would-be tech moguls believe that computing will not only help them make money, but also secure peace in their land.”
And it was not just tech companies that were hopeful. Code Weekend was part of a slew of initiatives that aimed to spur youth innovation, entrepreneurship, and, ultimately, engagement and leadership in building a more progressive Afghanistan—some funded by international donors with this express purpose.
Other examples included the TEDxKabul program, which first came to Kabul with its “ideas worth spreading” (the TEDx tagline) in 2012, as well as other entrepreneurship-focused global franchises like Founder Institute-Kabul, which ran from 2014 to 2017. (Hashimi played a role in both of these programs, as did I, at different times.) By 2016, even Google had come to town, launching Google for Entrepreneurs’ Startup Grind, a community for aspiring startup founders.
But Code Weekend outlasted all of these initiatives, even after some of its own leadership team, including Hashimi, left Afghanistan. In the seven years since its founding, the volunteer-organized group has held around 100 in-person meetups at universities, incubators, and the offices of prominent Afghan technology companies.During the pandemic, like much of the rest of the world, it went virtual.
Attendees met to learn everything from the basics of WordPress design and JavaScript languages to data collection tools for the field. (Afghanistan’s aid-driven economy had a big appetite for surveys and employed a number of ICT workers.) They heard from local startups and engineering teams that came to introduce their new apps. They discussed books popular in the global tech community, like The Passionate Programmer (which Hashimi presented). And once, in an all-night event, open-source enthusiasts came together to stream Laracon Online, the global conference for the open-source Laravel web development framework.
Then, in 2019, after years of these mostly weekend events, Code Weekend decided to go bigger: the group launched an in-person coding bootcamp. The first cohort ran with a pilot program of 15 developers, 12 of whom graduated from the four-month program. A few, according to Hashimi, found jobs as a result of their participation.
Elyas Afghan, 24, hopes to be one of them after he completes the bootcamp. Both of his older brothers are also in the field—one works for Rapid Iteration, Hashimi’s company—and partly as a result of their influence, he says, working with computers is all he’s ever wanted to do. More specifically, he hopes to find a job working for a global tech company.
After the successful pilot, Code Weekend organizers planned for a second cohort, but the coronavirus slowed down their efforts. Then, in late August of last year, the Afghan government collapsed—but rather than ending their plans, this accelerated them.
“Lots of dreams shattered when the government fell,” recalls Hashimi, who by then had relocated to Vancouver, Canada. Like many Afghans in the diaspora, he had a deep “urge to do something.” And what he settled on, he says, was continuing to help in the way that he knew best: supporting Afghan coders. “People need hope,” he said—and since earlier events focused on tech or innovation provided it, he hoped that a coding boot camp would do the same.
Hashimi’s goal for the bootcamp is to “provide a more sustainable way for Afghan youth to learn new and market-driven skills,” he wrote in our initial email correspondence, and with those skills to “start earning an income for themselves and their families.”
For many of the bootcamp participants, all of whom share these goals, the potential for online work might be their only option. In 19-year-old Sherzoy’s family, only her father is currently employed—and what he makes is hardly enough to support her and her six siblings. After the bootcamp, she says, she hopes to “help my family and do something for my future.” She adds, “I do not want to be illiterate [uneducated].”
Thus far, however, most of the income opportunities are coming through Hashimi’s other efforts: in addition to Code Weekend, he also runs a software development company that employs or contracts with over 20 Afghan programmers, most of whom are still in Afghanistan, as well as an online freelancing platform, Yagan Kar (meaning “some work” in Dari), for Afghan freelancers.
It’s an adjustment to his original, pre-Taliban plans. Even after Hashimi left Afghanistan in 2016 for a master’s degree in the UK in innovation management, he used to spend three or four months in his home country every year, supporting the burgeoning tech community. “My dream,” he says, was “having the largest software house in Afghanistan.”
In a way, that’s still his goal. “I want to bring 1,000 jobs by 2023” from outside the country, he says, which “would help a lot of freelancers and youths and developers and also the economy.”
He says that “all Afghans want to leave,” but the reality is that the vast majority of them are ineligible for resettlement and evacuation efforts. They will remain in Afghanistan, and will need new sources of income. Hashimi sees the international tech community as a potential provider of that income, through both remote and freelance work.
But all of this will take time, and the country faces more urgent challenges.
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
