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, who are from Pakistan, left engineering jobs at Facebook and Microsoft to start Educative in 2015, and much of its engineering team works in Lahore, Pakistan.

Engineers who could not learn fast enough

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. “Tech is fast-paced, but technical learning was so slow, unorganized, and inefficient,” he wrote on his personal site.

A rejected book idea

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. The company later went through the Techstars Seattle accelerator.

Teach like you talk

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.