After years of working in tech, Brian Peret is dedicating his time to making the industry more accessible.

Peret, a developer-turned-software-engineer originally from Milwaukee, WI, understood the importance of technology firsthand while attending graduate school in Tampa, FL. Ultimately, It was a nudge from his brother that first got him thinking about transitioning from the wet sciences (chemistry and biomedical engineering) to tech, but he didn’t make the pivot until the 2008 recession.

“In a time when everyone else is losing their jobs and people are foreclosing on homes and losing their homes, I’m seeing computer programmers and developers gain wealth. That’s when I really realized that in technology, there is this entire industry that for those who can do the skills and do the job, there will always be a job for you out there. So that’s kind of what got me on board, and then that passion has just increased time and again,” Peret said during an interview with AFROTECH™.

Peret’s first role in tech was as a developer, marking the first time in his life he was earning a steady income. However, after personal struggles with alcohol and hanging out with people who weren’t good influences, he went to prison from November 2018 to July 2020. This season in life led him to a newfound purpose: to make the tech industry not only a path of personal growth but also a tool for uplifting others in his community who had faced similar hardships.

“I saw that there are so many attributes that make people successful in technology that already exist in people who have seen the hardest that life has,” he mentioned. “Some of the best developers I know are the people that have either had to go to prison and withstand some kind of hardship, or they’ve had some other kind of personal tragedy that gives them resilience or grit, or they have some kind of curiosity.”

CodeBoxx Academy

In 2022, Peret joined the St. Petersburg, FL-based CodeBoxx Academy as a part-time coach and became its academy director within three months. CodeBoxx Academy offers various coding programs that have helped students secure roles with clients such as eBay, Cybercat, Explore AI, Coveo, and others.

It offers two flagship programs. The first is its Full Stack Development course, which can only be taken on-site (full-time commitment only) or virtually (full-time or part-time). According to its website, students will explore various aspects of software development — including back-end, quality assurance, and scrum — and the program is designed to align with each student’s individual career goals.

The program will introduce languages and frameworks such as React Native, HTML, Java, and Node Express, among others and web services such as AWS and Google Cloud. Additionally, skills that can be learned include:

Web design
Web and mobile applications
Authentication
Agile methodologies
Quality assurance

“That’s the program that when you graduate, you go into CodeBoxx’s placement services where we help you with resume reviews, mock interviews, your LinkedIn profile, networking. We plug you into our client pipeline. That’s the life-changing program,” Peret acknowledged.

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Its most recent program, integrated in the spring 2025, is AI for Developers. It equips students in large language models, deep learning, DevOps, voice recognition, video reconstruction, and object detection.

“This class is designed and intended for people who are already developers, people who already are in the field and recognize that AI is coming, recognize that they may lose their job to AI unless they learn how to use these tools, and it gives them the tools necessary to be the AI developers of the future,” Perit said.

CodeBoxx Academy has eclipsed the 300-graduate mark and has an 80% graduation rate and 79% placement rate.

“Technology is empowerment,” Peret expressed. “We believe fundamentally that you give people a good job that pays them enough money, and they’ll find a way to figure out 95% of their problems. And we believe that technology allows us to do that at a scale that can affect not just the household but an entire community.”

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