Fahim ul Haq

Fahim ul Haq is co-founder and chief executive of Educative, an online learning platform where software engineers read short lessons and run code in the browser without installing anything. He and his brother Naeem left day jobs at Facebook and Microsoft to start it.

Keeping Up as a Microsoft Engineer

Before Educative he was a software engineer at Facebook, now Meta, and at Microsoft, where he worked on Azure Storage. Keeping his own skills current was the problem that started the company.

A Book Offer That Became Educative

The brothers first built a mobile app that taught programming as a side project. In 2014 one of the largest publishers in America asked them to write a book based on it. They proposed a free companion website with interactive lessons, and the publisher was not interested, he told TheServerSide. Authors they talked to liked interactive lessons but found them harder to make than videos, so Educative built tools for authors alongside its courses.

Advice for Course Authors at Educative

His advice to course authors is plain: “Just keep it simple. Teach like you talk normally.” He expects interactive tools to become standard for companies as well as individual developers. “I think that in the future people will be taught by machines that know exactly what kind of content it takes to keep them engaged, and serve up personalized, interactive material to optimize for their growth,” he said.