Richard Ng

This edition of /now is a bit on the long side, as my first - future ones should be smaller!

What's new in my life?

🏠 I've left London for Birmingham

Having been in London since September 2017, I left in March 2020 - just before the first national lockdown in England. I basically took a look at my small rented London room, and decided that it would be pretty miserable to work remotely from there.

So, I did a classic 'boomerang' and moved back into my parents' home in (greater) Birmingham.

It's been pretty comfortable - odd being back with them for the longest period of time since legal adulthood, but my standard of living has certainly been good.

🔚 I quit my job mid-pandemic to take a 'GAP year'

Quitting job in a pandemic seems odd, but I did it!

I'd started as a Software Engineering Coach at WhiteHat back in August 2019, and made a lot of great memories through the work - but I knew in May that I wanted to leave.

As I quit, my plan was to take a year of trying out various projects, like a gap year.

You can read more about my decision here - in brief, it came down to looking for more Growth, Autonomy and Purpose (conveniently also forming the 'GAP year' acronym!).

🌱 I joined a great seed-stage startup

I joined Academy as Programme Lead - exiting my 'gap year', but in keeping with the GAP themes:

Growth: a company with incredible growth prospects

It's not every day that you can join the founding team of a company with such high calibre in founder and investors.

Academy's CEO is Ash, ex-Chief People Officer at The Hut Group (London's biggest ever tech IPO)

Academy's seed round is being led by LocalGlobe (one of Europe's top seed investors)

Autonomy: joining at a stage to really shape things

As a seed-stage startup, there's lots that is still getting built out. This means that I get the ability to shape things pretty significantly.

Purpose: solving problems that I really care about

It's an opportunity to focus on problems I've been thinking about a lot:

How can we empower people to have control over their future?

How can we increase diversity and inclusion in tech?

How can we build strong communities of learning and growth?

What am I focusing on?

Here are some questions that I'm thinking about and working on:

How do you support and accelerate diverse talent in tech?

This is a question that runs through lots of things I'm doing:

Programme Lead at Academy: building a new generation of leaders in tech

Teacher Training at Code Your Future: coding courses for refugees and asylum seekers

Coding Instructor at Black Codher: coding course for Black women

Mentor/Volunteer at Black Valley & Coders of Colour

How do we get more people from tech working on D&I?

There are lots of great organisations working on D&I in tech that deserve support.

What if we could mobilise greater numbers of people in tech to support these organisations?

(I'm currently working on something for this - please email me if it's of interest!)

How can I use my expertise to help even more?

Not many people sit across tech, education, startups and D&I in the way that I do.

I'm exploring what I can do to use this to help others with my expertise:

open-source course building?

value-add angel investing?

public writing and thinking?

What was I up to back then?