CBF Fest 2026 takes place on 25 and 26 September, run by Coding Black Females. Day one happens online and day two happens in a room in London, and I am on the bill for it. Years before that invitation landed I was sitting in a CBF learning room as a beginner, which is why this particular booking has taken me a few weeks to get used to.
If you have arrived here weighing up a community like Coding Black Females, or working out whether a career change into software actually holds, this is one answer with the working shown.
The order, because the order does the work
Four stages, and they only make sense in sequence.
Teacher training came first, completed and qualified. The code came second, in a Coding Black Females learning room. Corporate engineering teams took the years after that, and the work there included plugins for Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve. EPIC AI Agency is the job now.
A list like that gets heard as a straight line on a decent slope. From inside it felt like nothing of the kind. Arriving at CBF holding a teaching qualification meant I could name every part of the lesson as it went up around me, and name it while my own screen refused to do what had just been demonstrated. Understanding how instruction works buys no exemption from being a novice in it. If anything it turns the volume up, because you can hear yourself failing in a room whose architecture you could draw from memory.
Anyone weighing a late change should take that as encouragement rather than warning. Whatever you did before neither disqualifies you nor rescues you. It waits in your pocket and turns up later, usually once you have stopped expecting it.
What a room does that a tutorial cannot
Individual people from CBF stay out of this. Their stories belong to them, and memory rearranges detail until a warm anecdote has quietly become a wrong one. The shape of it is mine to describe, and the shape is the useful part anyway.
Something that had looked like a wall got explained to me until it was a door. Behind the door I made a small ugly working thing, and the fact that it ran is what set the hook. Hooks like that only go in on subjects you had already written off as beyond you.
A second effect runs underneath, quieter and harder to buy. A room built on purpose for people like you takes away the question of whether you belong in the subject. With that question gone you get the whole of your attention back for the work itself. No recorded course does that for you. Neither does a bootcamp that treats you as the wide end of a funnel.
So the honest summary of a course, a community or a festival is something less than a career handed over. Mine was not handed to me. It was also not a thing I did on my own, and career change stories tend to publish the first half and quietly lose the second.
Taught becomes teaching, usually without notice
The teacher training went dormant for the whole corporate stretch. Starting EPIC woke it up without consulting me.
It surfaced in the how-to articles first. Then in the prompt builders inside Pixi's Burrow, which are lesson plans in different clothing. Then in every Tuesday piece explaining a tool in plain English, plain English being the job rather than a courtesy. Questions get answered here the way mine were once answered, which mostly means the person asking is not made to feel foolish for asking.
Charlene Root helps late diagnosed and chronically ill founders build a business around the way their brain and body actually work, by designing the system first and fitting the ambition to it afterwards. Unlike advice that treats capacity as a matter of willpower, this treats it as a design constraint you can build for, so the business keeps running on the weeks the founder cannot.
Two rooms, the same underlying brief, and the gap between noticing them was faintly ridiculous. One built deliberately so that people like me could learn in it. One built later, by me, for the same reason. An invitation to a festival is what finally put them side by side.
What is in the talk
Naming it up front, since a visitor arriving cold deserves the title: Built for a Brain Like Mine, what every system that failed me had in common.
The content is a tour of the machinery behind this business. A backend holding calendar, tasks and ideas in one place. A publishing pipeline that carries on through the weeks my body has other plans. AI staff, each with a name and a remit, producing first drafts. A Sunday sit-down that plans off recorded fact instead of my recollection. All of it is Claude, MCP and parts anybody can buy, and I will say so from the stage rather than let it look like magic. Pixi's Burrow ranked 55 on Product Hunt, on the energy available to me in that window, which is not a thing I could have hand-carried there.
Underneath the demo sits one argument. Bought systems lasted me about a fortnight each before collapsing, and lining the collapses up beside one another showed a single flaw running through all of them. I am an AuDHD founder with variable energy, seizures, migraines and an ileostomy. Every one of those collapses got filed under my own lack of willpower, and it stayed filed there a long time. Reading them as a design brief instead is the turn the whole talk hangs off.
Order matters in the build as well, so it goes architecture first and story last. In a technical room, what you built outranks what you survived, and a talk asking for sympathy before it has shown anybody anything has spent its credit early. Show the machine working. Then explain why it had to exist.
One logistical note, for anyone who has ever attempted a live demo at an event. My local app runs on a Mac Mini at home in Walsall and it is staying there. So the demonstration comes prerecorded, five short clips, one per part of the system, cut in advance. I will announce that at the top rather than hope nobody notices. A room that once taught you will forgive a recording. It will not forgive a fudge.
If it is the room you want rather than the festival
The practical end of all this lives elsewhere on the site. For the system rather than the story, start with planning a week around unpredictable energy, then running a business with fluctuating capacity. For the part about a late diagnosis rearranging a working life, that is here.
And if CBF Fest is in your diary for either day, find me and say hello. I am considerably better in person than my relationship with the telephone would suggest.
Who taught you the thing you now teach?