One Year of Kitty: What's Next?

How this started

coding.kitty started with a simple idea, and with something I do a lot of: doom-scrolling.

Somewhere in the middle of one of those sessions I realised: the feed takes fifteen seconds of your time and gives you nothing back. So, why not build a channel that interrupts the doom-scroll and teaches you something useful instead?

Short-form platforms like Instagram and TikTok are built for attention. And what is cuter than a cat? (I really love cats.) So that is the concept: a cat grabs your attention, and once it has your attention, it teaches you something instead of wasting your next fifteen seconds.

That is the whole idea. Everything else has just been building on top of it.

What coding.kitty actually is

Coding concepts, explained by cats, in under 90 seconds.

That is the short version, and it is for anyone. The videos go out on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Every video is also on the site, sorted and searchable.

The year in numbers

Every one of these numbers is you. You are one of them, right now, reading this. None of it would exist without the love and support you have given this thing from the start.

The one stat that I keep coming back to is not the followers count; it's the 150+ topics we have covered in a year. Every one of those was somebody not understanding something, and now there is a cat explaining it.

And then there is 316, which is my favourite number on this list: the cats you have pinned to the board. None of those are ours.

#hackthekitty, our first virutal hackathon

Fourteen days, entirely online, on the theme of World Cat Domination Day. I did not know what to expect from a first event. This is what happened.

It was a real collaboration across the community, from every skill level, building together, sharing knowledge, and making a positive impact for the cat community. We ran sessions on security and on what it actually takes to ship a real application, plus opening and closing ceremonies.

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  First place: Pet Talk, a smart collar that lets you text your cat and get an answer back.

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  Second: Fitty, which scores a cat's body condition from two photos and tracks it over time.

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  Third: Meowderer, a gamified PWA for cataloguing the strays in your neighbourhood.

These are the top three winners. Every project from the hackathon is on the full leaderboard, and they are worth browsing through.

None of it would have happened without three sponsors who backed an event that had never run before, on nothing but a pitch deck and a cat logo.

Between them they put more than $5,000 into a prize-pool for a first-time event. I still find that slightly hard to believe.

And I got plenty wrong too. Timezones, judging, how much scaffolding a 14-day event actually needs, enough that it deserves its own post rather than a paragraph here. That one is coming.

The brands that backed it

Beyond the hackathon, this is who has worked with us over the year.

This matters more than a logo wall usually does, and not for the reason you would expect. It is not that recognisable brands make us legitimate. It is that this model, brands paying directly for education that teaches something real, connect with the community, and building something is exactly how the next section gets funded.

What we are building in year two

Come and build year two

If you take one thing from this post, make it this: the interesting part of coding.kitty was never just teaching. It was the community that showed up and decided to stay, the people helping each other in Discord, shipping projects together, and turning a content channel into something that actually belongs to them.

You made it to the end. That tells me you actually care about what we are trying to do here, and that means more than any metric on a dashboard.

The way you can continue showing your support and love is by simply following us everywhere. Every follow, on every social media platform, help us reach and teach more people. It keeps producing free content for you without costing you anything but indirectly funds everything above.