All Star Code

The are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. The franchise has not won a championship since 1973, and all of the young men All Star Code serves were born in a city that has not raised an NBA championship banner in 53 years.

All Star Code is a multi-year grantee of the , which has deployed more than $160 million in grants to nonprofits building career pathways for Black and Brown young men across the country since its founding in 2020. The Foundation’s work in New York runs through partners like All Star Code, where we build long-term tech career pathways for the city’s most motivated young men.

The Knicks and All Star Code occupy different arenas, but we are on the same team.

Congratulations to the New York Knicks on reaching the 2026 NBA Finals, and to every fan who has been waiting.

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Check out our latest community gathering - Insights from the Field: Navigating Tech Careers Today.

On May 14, All Star Code brought Scholars to Pier 57 in NYC for a conversation that stayed close to the real conditions of building a tech career now: crowded applicant pools, shifting AI expectations, quiet rejection, family pressure, sponsor relationships, and the kind of confidence that you need to survive today’s labor market.

Chris Reid, a tech recruiter at Snap, gave the room the scale of the market and what it looks like from the employer side. One job posting drew 6,000 applications in a week. He urged Scholars to make their work visible, keep their GitHub active, reach out before and after applying.

Mentor and Product Leader Danny Diaz pushed the AI conversation back toward judgment. Knowing Python or C++ is not enough by itself. A Scholar has to explain what changed because of the work, what problem was solved, where the tradeoffs were, and why a human decision was necessary. These are the skills in demand today.

Our Executive Director closed with his own job rejection story, and the mentor relationship that later grew from it. His advice was to be audacious and bet on yourself.

Please take a moment to listen to our Scholars. We have been placing bets on them every day since 2013. Those bet continues to pay off generously.

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All Star Code has a new Director of Workforce and Programs. Welcome, Gary Courtney.

Gary brings more than 20 years leading workforce development strategy at national scale. His background spans employer engagement, registered apprenticeship design, and cross-sector partnership development, connecting high-potential talent to career pathways aligned with real labor market demand.

He previously led large-scale apprenticeship and employer engagement initiatives at Jobs for the Future. He is a Certified Workforce Development Professional (CWDP) and an active member of the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals, the Project Management Institute, and the Apprenticeship Professionals Learning Network.

Gary joins All Star Code to lead national workforce strategy and program delivery, with a focus on strengthening the Launching Digital Futures continuum, expanding employer partnerships, and building a more structured pipeline for Scholar internships and career placement.

The experience Gary brings, advising workforce boards, community-based organizations, employers, and higher education institutions across the country, is exactly the infrastructure expertise this organization needs at this stage of growth.

Please join us in welcoming him to the team.

A Reminder That Parenting in the Intelligence Age Requires a Human Touch

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape daily life, experts at The Fortune Society’s fifth annual Tech Fair urged parents to approach the digital age with structure, curiosity, and a healthy dose of grace.

The event, presented in partnership with John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity centered on the theme “Tech in Action.” Panels and workshops focused on the practical digital literacy skills required to navigate modern employment and family life.

Representing the technology education sector our own Senior Director of Teaching and Learning, Khye Borg Liew participated in a prominent panel addressing the complexities of raising children in an increasingly automated world. Khye offered a grounded framework for families, emphasizing that A.I. should be utilized to support educational outcomes without superseding human judgment, curiosity, or interpersonal connection.

The discussion yielded several guiding principles for parents navigating these new technologies:

Establish boundaries: Create clear, consistent structures around screen time.

Embrace boredom: Allow children to experience unstructured, screen-free time, noting that boredom remains a crucial catalyst for creativity.

Collaborative learning: Engage with new digital tools alongside children, using the technology to deepen family connections rather than create generational divides.

Give yourself grace: Acknowledge the unprecedented challenges of modern parenting.

The conversation was further expanded by fellow panelist Ilya Layshevsky, whose work focuses on the intersection of social-emotional learning and digital tools for youth, bringing an essential psychological dimension to the discourse.

In a sector where discussions frequently default to the mechanics of new software, the panel notably remained focused on the underlying human elements. The dialogue prioritized questions of how families can collectively make sense of A.I., how parents can build confidence, and how educators can help learners wield technology with care and judgment.

The All Star Code Summer Intensive is a rigorous, tuition-free, live virtual technical training sprint designed for male identifying students in high school (rising 9th through 12th grade), with rising college freshmen also welcome. The intensive runs for six weeks, taking place from July 6 through August 14, 2026.

The curriculum builds proficiency across web development, foundational AI literacy, and systems thinking, with no prior coding experience required. Scholars choose from two scheduling options, both Eastern Time: the AM Cohort (9:00am–1:00pm) or the PM Cohort (11:00am–4:00pm).

Participants learn through collaborative projects, culminating in a capstone project that serves as the foundation of their technical portfolio. They present this work to industry executives and engineers at Demo Day, demonstrating both their capabilities and their systematic problem-solving approach.

This program is designed as Phase 1 of the Launching Digital Futures pathway, a structured career framework spanning high school through workforce placement. It offers ongoing mentorship and builds a community through a sustained near-peer cycle, where successful former scholars return to instruct and guide the next cohort.

Since 2013, the program has trained over 2,200 scholars, with more than 500 currently employed in the technology sector. For those interested in participating, the process emphasizes immediate action; applying this week is strongly encouraged.

Scenes from a Harlem Opportunity Fair.

All Star Code tabled on the plaza at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building last Saturday for the Summer Youth Resource Fair, hosted by and . Families, students, and community organizations moved through 125th Street all afternoon, sharing summer programs, internships, and career pathways with young people before April deadlines close.

High school students in 9th through 12th grade can still apply for the All Star Code Summer Intensive 2026, a six-week program of project-based technical training, AI literacy, and workforce preparation offered free of charge to students nationally. Application deadline: April 17. Apply at apply.allstarcode.org/si26.

Thank you to , Deputy Borough President Miesha Smith, and Director of Special Events Kiara Royer for the invitation and the coordination.

One of the organizations tabling alongside us was . Representing them was Jordan Haskell, a 2017 All Star Code Scholar who now serves as a Client Advocate at , a Brooklyn nonprofit delivering workforce development, housing support, and direct services to tens of thousands of New Yorkers each year. Jordan came through the pipeline, built a career in community service, and showed up Saturday to connect more young people to opportunity. That is what the near-peer cycle looks like in practice.

P.S. Shoutout to . Chef Tami launched that mobile kitchen on that exact corner in April 2016, and a decade later that queue is stronger than ever.

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Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, said it plainly: there will be more software engineers in five years than there are now. The volume of software being built is increasing. Evaluating what the agents produce, maintaining the systems, and catching the errors all require people who understand what code is actually doing. Employers report that entry-level developers learning this paradigm, without years of old habits to work against, are exactly who they need.

You can either use the software...or BUILD IT! Build with us.

https://bit.ly/3PT2Eu7

National Robotics Week takes place this week, and All Star Code is sharing a browser-based coding program from our partner Microsoft. The MakeCode Arcade platform allows high-potential talent to design, code, and program virtual robots without any hardware requirements at https://bit.ly/3PUyQNH.

The Summer Intensive serves as an entry point for high-potential talent to build foundational skills for robotics and other fields in the innovation economy. All Star Code has served 9,000+ learners nationwide and graduated 2,200+ Scholars from the Summer Intensive, with 500+ now working in technology roles.

Apply at https://bit.ly/4e81kxs and begin a direct pathway through the Launching Digital Futures tech talent pipeline.

everyone has an opinion on how you should learn to code. watch this playlist. download this app. pay for this subscription. but none of it connects to anything real. you finish a module, and then what?

the All Star Code Summer Intensive is six weeks. you work with other students. you build a real web app together. you present it to engineers and hiring managers from real companies. you leave with work you can actually point to.

it costs nothing. not "free trial" nothing. actually nothing. because whether your family can afford a monthly subscription shouldn't determine if you get to learn this.

apply by April 17. https://bit.ly/3PIUqoq

It's our birthday. Thirteen years ago, on March 18, 2013, All Star Code incorporated and we have been building ever since.

We have that defiant teen energy today. The kind that comes with knowing 9,000+ learners have been touched by your programming, 2,200+ Scholars standing tall in our community, and 500+ working in tech careers.
The fresh faces of that first cohort, beaming with potential and hope, some not yet 16, are now hitting their late twenties and finding their footing in the industry. They navigated multiple economic cycles, learned new skills on the job, and have faced the uncertainty of an AI-shaped present and future head-on. They still came back. Some financially. Others in the classroom, leading the next wave of cool kids at our lunch table.

The pipeline has run at $0 tuition since the day it incorporated. No permission slips. No hall passes. Our "school" lets students discover who they are and who they can become, because of a community that shows up, from program, corporate, and educational partners to individual donors making a difference $5 at a time.

Most teens go through an awkward phase. We like to think we have glowed up nicely. If you can find it in your heart and virtual wallet to support us with $13, we promise to do something enriching with our screen time.

Heres to Year 14.

Donate at https://bit.ly/3NmMFnf

nobody sat you down and told you how to get into tech. there's no roadmap. just a bunch of random advice and programs that all seem like they were made for kids who already had a head start.

All Star Code actually has a plan, and it makes sense. three stages. first one, Tech Exposure, is where you start. no prerequisites, you don't need to know anything. second, Tech Pathways (that's the Summer Intensive), is where it gets real. six weeks with a team building a web app that has to work by demo day. you present it to engineers and hiring managers from real companies. third, Tech Mobility. that's what happens after. 500+ alumni are in the workforce now. your mentor picks up the phone when you need a reference two years later.

the whole thing is free because the people running it think money shouldn't be the reason you don't get to do this.

apply by April 17. https://bit.ly/3PDQODQ - link in the bio