Learn to code, land your first engineering job, and keep leveling up. Join our community where you don't have to do it alone.
We're a group of people who never stop growing and learning. It started when Philip helped several hundred people learn to code through open-source projects and a non-profit he co-founded in Japan. Nekko Dojo was born to open that kind of place up to more people, and to teach software engineering on a broader scale.
Our largest group has by far been English teachers in Japan, who still love Japan and want a longer-term career option. If this sounds like you, come join in!
Lately our focus is helping people understand the industry's latest shift: AI. Lots of people are asking the same questions:
“Will AI delete software jobs?”
“Should I still learn to code?”
“Where should I even start?”
We hope to answer them through a guide (coming soon) and through our community.
One of the best things you can do to learn and land a coding job is to contribute to open-source projects. Your work is visible to employers, and it's one of the few industries where you can prove how you work before you're hired. You show that you can work on a team, how much you get done and how quickly you learn, and real shipped features you can point to.
Especially if you code with agents, you have an amazing chance to help others in the community. We appreciate your help: you make Nekko Dojo what it is today.
Join the Discord →The dojo meets you wherever you are — there's a mat for every stage.
Post-bootcamp to signed offer: interviews, résumé, strategy, practice.
Prep the interviews →
The job is shifting under you. Learn to direct agents instead of out-typing them.
See the AI course →Field notes on engineering, AI, and building a career in Japan, written by people doing the work.
Factories went fully automated in 2001. Now the same pattern is arriving in software, and a handful of teams are already shipping production code that no human wrote or reviewed.
When anyone can rebuild any app in a day, moats and money move. Cloudflare's new monetization gateway and the x402 protocol are the first signals of a pay-per-access web, and it could reshape the free internet we grew up with.
I went from teaching English in Japan to a safety job at Amazon to Code Chrysalis, a Tokyo bootcamp, to full-time software engineer at Nekko Labs. Three choices made the difference: not outsourcing my thinking to AI, investing in relationships, and contributing to open source, where I met my current boss.
Total beginners, job hunters, and working engineers — same mat, same community. 12 chapters and counting.
