Openness Partner Spotlight: Codetoki Partners with BizSpark to Empower Youth with Coding Skills

Posted by Openness Team

The Philippine Government wants to empower today’s youth by increasing employability, and sees better IT skills as a major enabler. In 2013, local software company, Codetoki, decided to help by devising an online game that tests and scores coding skills.

“My vision was to create a skills-development game where students could learn technical skills that are commercially in demand, but which are not taught in schools,” said Ademar Tutor, Codetoki’s Chief Technology Officer.

Ademar and his colleague built their Codetoki app using Ruby on Rails and MongoDB, and deployed it on Ubuntu Linux servers. To bring their app to students, however, Ademar needed to find a low-cost, cloud-infrastructure partner to host their web servers and databases.

Codetoki partnered with Microsoft through the BizSpark program, which includes Microsoft Azure cloud hosting services, as well as local technical support. “With Azure, we have a highly interoperable cloud platform that allows our Windows- and Linux-based applications to work seamlessly together,” said Ademar. “It also enables us to continue building out Codetoki with development languages and frameworks of our choice, without worrying about platform and integration issues.”

By using Microsoft cloud technologies, Codetoki has helped bring a new dimension to the Philippine Government’s ICT skills-empowerment strategy. In its first year, Codetoki attracted more than 2,745 players in 155 schools and by early 2014, Codetoki was providing skills assessments that helped young Filipinos into ICT jobs.

Check out the complete Codetoki case study to learn more.