A coding institute,
built on real work.
EkoHacks teaches employable software engineering and widens access to digital skills in the places the industry rarely reaches.
Where it began
EkoHacks began with a belief. Engineering is a craft, and a craft is learned in community, through deliberate practice and honest feedback.
Teaching in Lagos, where talent was abundant and serious engineering training was out of reach for most junior developers, we set a simple aim. Rigorous training that junior developers could afford, taught the way the work is really done.
The teaching and the building were never separate. We ran workshops and built software for clients side by side, and the curriculum grew out of that practice, tested on real projects before it was ever a course.
From Lagos to Alexandroupolis
- The beginningLagos, Nigeria
Teaching and shipping
The first cohorts, and the first software shipped for real clients.
- Along the wayOpen source
We built our own tools
Our own open source stack, EkoLite and EkoFlow, built to run on modest machines.
- NowGreece and Europe
Civic technology, shipping
Open source membership and organising platforms on CiviCRM, for civil society and public institutions.
- NowEvros, GreeceLaunching now
Launching the dojo in Greece
Our first European cohort, on the cross border with Bulgaria and Türkiye, building one real product for the community.
- NextThe Balkans and AfricaWhere we are heading
A growing institute
More cohorts, more teachers, and new places across the Balkans and back to Africa.
Anastasios Orfanidis
Founder and lead teacher
Anastasios founded EkoHacks and teaches its courses live.
Before EkoHacks he spent thirteen years shipping production software for regulated clients. He wrote EkoLite and the EkoHacks CLI, and he built the dojo platform.
He writes Ideas, an account of each day's events and discoveries as the work happens.
He teaches test driven development and testing without mocks, the way he works himself, beside a team of developers trained in the dojo.
What we are building
It still works the way it began. Our studio delivers real client work, and that practice feeds straight back into the dojo, so learners train on the same disciplines our engineers use to ship.
The model is proven, open, and built to travel, so every new cohort leaves more skilled developers and more software a community can run.
Reaching wherever opportunity is scarce, one community at a time.
AI works best in hands that can judge it
The hardest part of adopting AI is trust. Knowing where it creates genuine leverage, and how to bring it into the way people already work.
As these systems grow more capable, we care just as much about what happens to human judgement, critical thinking and the quality of work when people come to rely on them.
So we teach AI the way we teach everything else. Learners use it every day, and they learn to read, question and test what it writes, so their judgement grows with the tools.
EkoLite, our open source engine
A real time backend for data driven apps, written in TypeScript and small enough to read in full.