DevCareer and Cyberiad Labs partner to teach Nigeria’s next developers how to use AI efficiently
Most developers now use AI, and fewer of them trust what it produces. DevCareer’s first 250 learners start Cyberiad Labs’ AI course on 2 November.
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RALEIGH, N.C., and LAGOS, Nigeria, 30 October 2026. Cyberiad Labs and DevCareer today announced a partnership that gives DevCareer’s learners free places in Cyberiad Labs’ classes. It starts with 250 places in the class that opens on Monday 2 November 2026, with more in future classes. The course, Introduction to AI and LLMs, is online, part-time and four weeks long.
DevCareer’s places come on top of the public ones, which are full for every class until the end of 2026. This is Cyberiad Labs’ thirteenth education partnership.
DevCareer began with a tweet. In 2019, Sultan Akintunde, a Nigerian software developer who had started his own career learning to code on a mobile phone, asked the developer community to help raise ₦1 million to buy laptops for 10 developers who could not afford one. When a sponsor asked what would happen once the laptops were handed out, he and Chidi Okoye, another software developer, turned the campaign into DevCareer, a non-profit. Its first cohort of 22 developers received laptops, free courses, mentors and space to work in partner tech hubs for three months.
Since then, DevCareer has run a six-month programme with the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub, a UK Government initiative, to train 1,700 Nigerians in software development, product management and product design. It gives full scholarships for Coursera Professional Certificates through its Learning for Impact programme, with 500 learners from across Africa in its current cohort, and it runs hackathons with companies such as Nomba and Raenest. DevCareer says its community now has more than 41,000 members, that it has trained more than 9,000 people, and that more than 60 mentors work with it.
AI is now part of a developer’s job. In Google’s 2025 DORA report, a survey of nearly 5,000 people who build software, 90% said they use AI at work, for a median of two hours a day. Only 24% said they trust it a lot or a great deal. In a 2026 survey of more than 1,100 developers by Sonar, a company that sells software for checking code, 96% said they do not fully trust that code written by AI works, and only 48% said they always check it before adding it to their project. GitHub counts Nigeria among the African countries expected to add millions of developers in the coming years, and names community bootcamps among the reasons for the growth in Africa and the Middle East.
“Olaitan learned software engineering and back-end development on my programmes at ALX. Today he manages the programmes of a community that has helped Nigerians start careers in tech since 2019,” said Julien Barbier, co-founder of Cyberiad Labs. “Nigerians were my largest group of learners at ALX, and they were the largest group in our first class at Cyberiad Labs. New developers now write code with AI right away, but AI can be wrong while sounding sure of itself. You need to check its output before you push code to production. The software engineers who will get hired are the ones who understand that, and who catch AI’s mistakes.”
“When DevCareer started, the barrier was a laptop. Today it is AI,” said Olaitan Adedokun, Programs Manager at DevCareer. “Our members already use AI in our hackathons and in their jobs. With Cyberiad Labs, they will learn how it works, where it fails, and how to check what it gives them before they rely on it. I learned with Julien at ALX, so I know how he teaches. I want our community to learn AI that way.”
Cyberiad Labs’ Introduction to AI and LLMs (large language models) is for everyone, including people who write code. It teaches learners what AI is, how it works and where it fails. In the first week, they see that the system answering so confidently is a program predicting text, one small piece at a time, and that it can be wrong. Throughout the course, they practise checking its answers, asking for its sources and verifying them, and deciding for themselves when to rely on it.
Learners who pass the four weekly quizzes earn a certificate they can add to their LinkedIn profile, where anyone can check that it is real. Cyberiad Labs’ first class opened on 14 September with 1,005 learners from 51 countries, 95% of them in Africa. Nigerians were its largest group, and the class rated its sessions 4.8 out of 5 on average.
“DevCareer started by giving developers laptops, because you cannot learn to code without a device. I know that problem: I finished my own software engineering programme on an Android tablet,” said Youssef Charif Hamidi, co-founder of Cyberiad Labs. “So we built our course for the devices people already have. It works on a phone or a computer, and on the first day every learner installs a small AI model that runs on their own device, so they keep access to AI even when the internet drops.”
DevCareer’s learners register through a link Cyberiad Labs sends them, and can follow the course anywhere they have a phone or a computer and an internet connection. The course is in English, written in plain words for people whose first language is not English, and every chapter has a player that reads it out loud. Other non-profits and foundations that don’t charge their learners can ask for free places of their own at julien@cyberiadlabs.com.
About Cyberiad Labs
Cyberiad Labs teaches people to work with AI without handing it their thinking. Those skills help people keep a job or find one, and help organisations keep up as AI changes their work. It teaches learners directly, and works with schools, universities, companies, NGOs and governments.
Julien Barbier co-founded Holberton School, a software engineering school with no teachers, no lectures and no upfront tuition. It grew from one campus in San Francisco to 32 worldwide before it was acquired. He then led product and growth at ALX across its software engineering and applied AI programmes, where the number of learners went from a few thousand to more than 1.6 million. Before Holberton, he was the first head of marketing, growth and community at Docker.
Youssef Charif Hamidi is a full-stack engineer. He learned to code on Julien’s 12-month ALX software engineering programme. He finished it on an Android tablet, because cerebral palsy limits him to about two words a minute on a computer keyboard. Previously, he built MathVellum, a maths editor for people who cannot hold a pen.
Home: https://www.cyberiadlabs.com
About DevCareer
DevCareer is an African nonprofit breaking down barriers to tech education. We help aspiring and underrepresented talent find their footing in the industry by providing what they actually need to succeed: free learning resources, training, mentorship, and even laptops. For us, it’s about more than just teaching people how to code. We’re building a supportive community where African tech professionals can collaborate, solve real-world problems, and launch lasting careers that drive the continent’s tech ecosystem forward. https://devcareer.io
Contact information
Julien Barbier, co-founder, Cyberiad Labs, julien@cyberiadlabs.com
Olaitan Adedokun, Programs Manager, DevCareer, programs@devcareer.io
Sources
- GitHub, “Octoverse: A new developer joins GitHub every second as AI leads TypeScript to #1”, 28 October 2025.
- Google, “How are developers using AI? Inside Google’s 2025 DORA report”, 23 September 2025.
- Sonar, “Sonar Data Reveals Critical “Verification Gap” in AI Coding: 96% Don’t Fully Trust Output, Yet Only 48% Verify It”, 8 January 2026.