urbanSTL

They were all part of the last generation to be born in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before war ripped the European country apart in the ’90s. They were all, as children, uprooted to an unknown city that would later come to be known as the capital of the Bosnian diaspora: St. Louis. It’s believed the greater metropolitan area around the Gateway City has the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia-Herzegovina, estimated to be near 70,000.

Twenty years later, their lives are very different. Yugoslavia’s children are graduating college, having babies and entering the workforce. These days, it would seem their interrupted childhoods were generations away, but their success came with stories of their own, filled with a whole new set of challenges.

"The MOOC (massive open online course) failure rate is notoriously high — only 1% of people who take the beginning computer science programming class, CS50, that Harvard offers over the EdX online platform complete it. A new effort in St. Louis called LaunchCode is changing that — and solving the city's programmer shortage. For the past several weeks, about 300 hardy souls have been gathering in a downtown St. Louis library to listen to the CS50 lectures and work together on the various programming problem sets. But the support offered by the all-volunteer run LaunchCode doesn't end with meet space. They're also doing an end-around on the traditional coder hiring process by pairing the students who complete the course with experienced programmers in one of more than a 100 tech companies who are looking for talent."