The interest of Nigerians in programming is reaching unimaginable levels in recent times. According to a recent tweet by Quincy Larson, founder of FreeCodeCamp, Nigerians are now the third biggest users of the platform.
You know that Nigeria 🇳🇬has a surging developer scene when it's the third most-represented country on @freeCodeCamp.
Shout out to the 142,110 Naija devs who are expanding their skills and ramping up their careers here. pic.twitter.com/yarXkk7rWz
— Quincy Larson (@ossia) February 20, 2019
Statistics from Alexa, it shows that Nigerians account for 4.1% of all site traffic to FreeCodeCamp. This means there are more Nigerians on the platform than users from either UK or Japan.
And this speaks volumes about the interest of Nigerians in developing computer science skills.
Despite the growing importance of technology in Nigeria, the country’s government has done little to support IT education. From primary school to the university level, computer science education is mostly outdated.
With this large dearth in the country’s computer science and other IT education, Nigeria ordinarily should be at risk of losing out in the digital economy.
However, this has not been the case.
On the contrary, Nigerians have been offsetting the dearth in the country by increasingly teaching themselves how to code.
Thanks to the internet, Nigerian developers have increasingly become self-taught. With multiple free online learning platforms, Nigerians have easily picked up skills ranging from Java to HTML.
And there are a couple of important platforms available online helping to fuel this interest in IT learning. They include Udemy, w3schools, tutorialspoint, and SitePoint. FreeCodeCamp is also another self-learning enabler. But the platform has advanced computer science curriculum similar to universities.
So it’s impressive that Nigerian developers are increasingly going this route to get the requisite IT skills they need.
And the results from all these are pretty glaring.
For instance, during the GitHub Universe Conference, one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, Nigerians were lauded for notable contributions to the GitHub platform. According to data from the event, Nigeria produced the fourth highest number of new users in 2018.