What Bitwise taught me about coding lives on years later
A thank you letter to Roy Wood Jr. and Bitwise for helping to improve tech education for Black and Brown students and workers
This post is part of a series entitled “BlackTechLogy.” Click here for the archived posts.
When I heard the news of Stephen Colbert’s last season on “The Late Show” and Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension of his own late-night show, Roy Wood Jr. popped into my head both times. I’d listened to every episode of “Roy’s Job Fair” and am still curious what the views would’ve been like had Comedy Central given the field correspondent the opportunity to tag himself in as “The Daily Show” host after Trevor Noah tagged himself out. I never missed an episode when Trevor Noah was the host and would’ve tuned in as loyally for Roy Wood Jr.
Would Trump have tried to cancel “The Daily Show” with a new Black host with the same venom that he’s using to bully every city with a Black mayor? Probably. It wouldn’t have been as strategic as Retire All Government Employees is, which has destroyed the jobs of approximately 300,000 Black women. As far as I am aware, there is only one person mad at late-night hosts (and Kimmel's suspension was lifted on Tuesday, September 23). RAGE has a permanent vendetta against an entire demographic.
Have you checked out Trinity’s “Five Minutes”? You should!
Roy Wood Jr. has news for us
But Roy Wood Jr. quit and found other opportunities, including hosting CNN's “Have I Got News for You.”
Additionally, Trevor Noah and Roy Wood Jr. are still friendly and the two will reunite on the latest season of “What Now?” — the podcast Trevor Noah created in 2023 following his prior Luminary Podcast “On Second Thought” with David Kibuuka from August 2020 to July 2021.
But outside of the comedy, political commentary and opinions on a little bit of everything, there was another reason I appreciated Roy Wood Jr.’s job podcast. (It was not the “Burnt Out, Burnt Out” episode when a Human Resources co-host cheered “YES!” in regard to another HR rep terminating 100 people in one day. I cringed at this Black woman crooning “absolutely” after Roy Wood Jr. verified that she was celebrating this mass-firing news. To my relief, the latter HR rep stated, “that if you get to a point in which laying off people becomes very transactional for you and you don’t feel anything from it, then you need to get out of HR.”)
What I did appreciate most about Roy Wood Jr.’s podcast was an episode when he announced Bitwise Industries, an organization that was offering free HTML/CSS web coding and Javascript training. It was specifically encouraging people of color to sign up.
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Although I’d somehow figured out the basics of HTML coding from a combination of MySpace, Yahoo Geocities and trial-and-error in the early 2000s, if someone had asked me to write a technical manual, I’d be at a loss.
Like a musician who can play music by ear but can’t read sheets, everything I’d learned about coding was one long guessing game that miraculously helped me pay bills for 20 years. I signed up for the Bitwise course because I was excited to finally learn coding the traditional way — even if artificial intelligence will more than likely take over this job.
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When the course started, seeing a group of Black and Brown faces — mainly Black women — was a welcome surprise. Finding out the HTML coding course would be taught by two Hispanic women was a delight as well.