Facebook will shut down the MultiUni page in a few days due to inactivity. That is generous because I don't think anything of value was posted to the page in the last decade. MultiUni ceased to exist long before this day, like my social life.
MultiUni was founded in 2009 by Huy Zing. Huy was my lecturer at RMIT. He understood the hurdles one had to jump through to open a course in an institute like a university because he had never succeeded in doing so. And he understood that formal education was not suitable for everyone because he was more of a software engineer than a lecturer. I assisted in a couple of courses. Though I have never seen a mission statement of MultiUni but if there was, it probably read like this: to bring the latest and most important technology courses to as many people in the local community as possible. We did exclusively in-person classes. We also did it for free. Pretty sure that was why I ended up writing this sunset post.
Free in-person tech courses. That might sound like a strange idea today but the world was also stranger back then. Open courses from the likes of MIT, Stanford, or Harvard were still in the infant stage. Coursera was not founded until 3 years later in 2012. English was a bigger barrier than it is today. Not everyone was social media native, I remember we had to discuss whether MultiUni on Facebook, yeah the one being shut down, should be a page or a group.
The first course was #iphonedev. The app store debuted the year before and mobile app development was all the rage. There was no iOS, only iPhone. There was no Swift, only ObjectiveC. There were few Macs, but plenty of hackintosh wannabes. Huy taught this class himself. Phu and I were his assistants. We would read the material the week before, do the exercise, internalize it, and bring it to the class the week after. Well, at least ideally. There were times we started reading the material in the morning of the evening class. I met Kien in that class who eventually ended up becoming a mobile developer for no less than Google Singapore.
The second course was probably an Android one. It felt like a compulsory follow-up to the iPhone course. The Yin and the Yang. Probably, because I didn't stand that class. Huy met Binh online, whom I was told was among the first self-taught Android developers in Saigon those days, and convinced Binh a community course was the next best thing he could do. Binh went on and hit many high notes in his career, Huy was probably right.
Then my memory got blurry. School got crazier. I ran my own club. Huy returned to the US at some point. Between here and there there might be a couple more courses but I couldn't really tell. In 2012, Phu and I (and many others) graduated and both worked at Cogini Inc. We thought it would be cool to bring the course back, so we made Web Tech 141. It was a 5-week course where each week we went through one web framework in a different programming language. PHP. Java. Roby. Python. I couldn't recall the last one for the sake of my life. Must be something not great. Erlang perhaps? I met An in that class, he is in the US now. And that was the last of it. 2012 was the year of Coursera, Khan Academy, and many more. Virtually every university worth its salt published its courses' recordings and material online. MultiUni sits in a corner of my profile to this day though I don't know how many still remember it.
The timing of this sunset is uncanny. Mobile development took the world by storm. It indeed changed the world in many ways better than Blockchain would ever do. Today GenAI is making a storm 10x the size. Vietnam in the late 2000s had a shortage of training materials and exposure. People shared what they knew more... primitively, for lack of a better word. What I meant was the organization was stretchy, and the presentation was dull even by the standard back then. Yet there was no hidden agenda, there were definitely personal interests but rarely a monetary one, and attempts to spread knowledge seemed genuine. Today, if someone puts a tutorial or a course online for free, you better check if it is to hype up a particular technology, an attempt to demonstrate the influence of a person in his/her little bubble of the Internet, or a demo version of consultancy or paid courses. Speaking of paid courses, MOOCs enable training on virtually any topic one can think of, good or bad. In fact, because it is easier to make bad content rather than good one, MOOCs are diamonds mixed in land mines. There are more hidden agendas. Or it could be that the world has always been like that, the people have always been like that, I was just naive. I wouldn't disagree, I was technically a teenager in the first MultiUni class, what did I know. And I would never know. No one baths in the same river twice. MultiUni is an obsolete invention, a stepping stone no longer needed by its environment, and a cache of fond memories in my coming-of-age journey.
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| I dug this logo up from a slide. That is everything I have left. |
P/S introducing Huy as one of my lecturers doesn't do him justice. Huy taught me a mere course out of 24 or so courses at RMIT. But he gave me my first job, exposed me and a bunch of others in my generation to the infectious Silicon Valley startup mindset, and started MultiUni and Barcamp Saigon both of which I ran for a while. Who I am today is the realization of the vision given by Huy in those early days. For this, I am forever grateful.
