TETA (Tech Entrepreneur Training Academy)

TETA, the Tech Entrepreneur Training Academy, was our software training bootcamp. We billed it as “Africa’s first CTO-focused software training academy”. The “CTO Academy” label you will see elsewhere on this site is a later shorthand; TETA is what we actually called it.

We built it for young Africans who wanted a career in software or machine learning and already had a builder’s mindset. Twenty places a cohort, filled by an aptitude test and then a one-on-one interview. I announced it on 20 September 2018; we had been working with startups for four years by then, and TETA was our attempt to train the people we kept needing to hire. It launched on teta.africa and later moved to teta.tecmie.africa.

The programme

Full-time, and we meant it: our team worked with trainees all day, every day, with daily pair programming and group projects. We said 16 weeks on the homepage and six months on the courses page and never got round to reconciling the two. The honest answer is that cohort length moved with the cohort.

The programme ran in three stages. Web fundamentals first. Then project planning alongside Python, Flask and Django, SCRUM and Agile, and security. Then a launch stage that ended in a hackathon and a demo.

We ran it project-first, with no formal teachers and no formal courses. Our mentors were Hackers in Residence. At the end every trainee launched their own product, and we covered a year of deployment and hosting for it.

Tracks

• Fullstack Immersive: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, version control, object-oriented programming, client-side JavaScript frameworks, Python and Django, REST, MongoDB, CI/CD.
• Accelerated Product Design: product research, UI, UX, gamification, value proposition design.
• Technical Project Management: Agile and SCRUM, user stories, database modelling, delivery timelines.

We later reshaped the application options into Fullstack Flex, Product Design, Tech Team Management and Full-time.

Timeline

• September 2018: launch post on the Tecmie blog; applications through tet.tecmie.com
• October 2018: www.teta.africa goes live
• February 2019: selected for Startup Turkey 100
• 2020: site unchanged
• 2025: applications closed at teta.tecmie.africa
• 2026: origin offline