{"id":82114,"date":"2021-10-09T17:43:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-09T22:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/?p=82114"},"modified":"2022-11-22T10:27:15","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T15:27:15","slug":"opening-doors-david-delmar-senties","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/news\/articles\/2021\/opening-doors-david-delmar-senties\/","title":{"rendered":"Opening Doors: Q&A With David Delmar Sent\u00edes"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Photos by Jackie Riccardi\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOpening Doors: David Delmar Sent\u00edes, Founder of Resilient Coders\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

David Delmar Sent\u00edes (CFA’06) is founder and executive director of\u00a0Resilient Coders, which trains people of color from low-income backgrounds for high-growth careers as software engineers and connects them with apprenticeships.<\/h4>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n
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October 9, 2021<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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This article was first published in Bostonia<\/em> on October 9, 2021. By Joel Brown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Delmar Sent\u00edes is founder and executive director of Resilient Coders<\/a>, which trains people of color from low-income backgrounds for high-growth careers as software engineers and connects them with apprenticeships. Students aged 18 to 30 pay nothing, receiving a small stipend to spend 20 weeks learning programming principles through JavaScript; they go on to work as full-time software engineers for companies as big as Wayfair, Constant Contact, athenahealth, and Humana, as well as numerous start-ups. The only request is that they help pull others through the door after them.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A Syracuse native, Delmar Sent\u00edes<\/a> (CFA\u201906) is a professional designer and interface developer. Before founding Resilient Coders, he was at PayPal, leading a team that designed and built first-to-market digital advertising concepts for brands like Starbucks, Coca-Cola, FedEx, and Pepsi. He has a book coming out, Power and Resistance<\/em> (Beacon Press, 2023), about creating a culture of economic justice in tech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bostonia<\/em> sat down with him at his organization\u2019s Kendall Square headquarters in Cambridge to find out how and why he founded Resilient Coders and what\u2019s next for the organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q&<\/span>A<\/h2>

BOSTONIA INTERVIEWS DAVID DELMAR SENT\u00cdES<\/h4><\/div>\n

News:<\/span> How did you get from the College of Fine Arts to running this nonprofit?<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

David Delmar Sent\u00edes:<\/strong> I\u2019m Latino, I grew up in a Spanish-speaking home. My parents immigrated from Mexico, and I was born here. I was able to go to BU, fortunately enough, to CFA, the School of Visual Arts, which was awesome. Plan A was to be a comic-book illustrator. Batman was my superhero favorite. Obviously, later on I fell in love with indie comics. I still make a lot of art<\/a>.
Then I graduated and needed to pay the rent. I just wanted a job in design, and everybody was like, \u201cCool that you can design this, but can you also code?\u201d I was like, no. And finally I kind of exaggerated\u2014by which I mean, made up\u2014my skills. I didn\u2019t really know much when I got my first job. They took a chance on me, and I, frankly, taught myself on the job. It was eminently self-teachable. And I realized that we should be teaching more people.

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself working in the tech start-up world, which I really love. But you look around you and it\u2019s like, \u201cWhere\u2019s mi gente<\/em> [my people]?\u201d I became very frustrated by that. I wasn\u2019t sure at first what I could do about that, but I knew at the very least that I could teach. And I believe in the idea of education as a liberating agent. And so I started volunteering, spending down my vacation days at a youth detention facility in Roslindale, the Judge John J. Connelly Youth Center. I volunteered down there with a bunch of boys and realized that I really needed to grow it.

I\u2019m loud. I was able to talk about the injustices these young men experienced, and pull together enough resources and funding to start Resilient Coders, with some early funding from the tech community and the Boston Police Department.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

News:<\/span> Did you, personally, ever feel a door was not open to you because of your background?<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think so. In this country we tend to think of Latinx as a race, and it\u2019s really not. It\u2019s a whole collection of races, nationalities, people. And I happen to be white Latinx. People often don\u2019t even know I\u2019m Latino unless I tell them. So whenever I\u2019ve sat down in front of a college admissions officer, a loan officer, an actual police officer, they\u2019ve only ever seen a white boy. This discovery of \u201cwhere\u2019s mi gente?\u201d was also a reckoning around my whiteness. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

News:<\/span> At first you worked with younger students?<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The problem working with high school\u2013age folks is that what everybody seems to care about is college matriculation. That\u2019s a solution, but that\u2019s not the<\/em> solution. So what we needed to do was build a boot camp program that would allow people to leapfrog college.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

News:<\/span> And your program has grown\u2026<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In 2016 we launched the boot camp. It was short, only eight weeks long, because that was all we could afford. And it wasn\u2019t good enough\u2014I failed an entire group of students. The program wasn\u2019t strong enough, and the employers weren\u2019t there the way I expected them to be. So I decided to spend the next several years in start-up mode, in a state of progressively more intelligent failure. Over the years we have pushed and grown and expanded to the point that now we offer five months of direct instruction, plus additional effort put into supporting our alumni, both on and off the job.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

News:<\/span> Is it working?<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m proud to say we do this pretty well now. Every single one of our graduates in December 2020, all of them, have jobs\u201416 or 17 folks. We decided to make it small for the back half of 2020 because of [COVID] lockdown, but employers came back in force. They are making good money. The average starting salary for that cohort is in the $90,000s. So we\u2019re pretty good at it now. So we\u2019re scaling up. We\u2019re operating in Boston, Philly, and Pittsburgh, and thinking about who we are and why we are.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

Read the Full interview in Bostonia<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\t