Chase Engelbrecht taught himself to code, then built the platform that spares kids the hard way

There is a certain kind of developer who learned everything the hard way and wants you to suffer accordingly. Chase Engelbrecht is the other kind. He taught himself to code, front end and back end, no degree, no bootcamp, and then spent a decade building a platform whose entire purpose is making sure six-year-olds never hit the walls he hit. It is the rare self-taught story where the moral is empathy instead of ego.

As co-founder and CTO of Codemoji, Chase is the engineering department. The curriculum turns emojis into real HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and somebody has to make that translation layer feel like magic instead of a science fair project. That somebody has kept the thing running through 200,000+ students, which is a lot of small humans clicking things they should not click.

Building for the world's least forgiving users

Consider the engineering brief. Your users cannot read error messages, will mash the keyboard like it owes them money, and are using hardware that school districts bought during a previous presidential administration. Everything must load fast, fail gracefully, and work on a Chromebook with a cracked screen and seventeen open tabs. Enterprise SaaS engineers would weep.

Chase's platform absorbs all of it. The drag-and-drop emoji editor is doing genuinely tricky work, compiling playful inputs into real markup while keeping the feedback loop instant, because a second grader's attention span does not do loading spinners. That it feels simple is the entire achievement.

And because this is edtech, he does it all inside the gravity well of school procurement, rostering integrations, and privacy law. Glamorous, no. Load-bearing, completely.

The quiet half of a loud idea

Codemoji's emoji hook gets the headlines, and Livio gets the interviews, which is how a good founder-CTO split works. But ideas are cheap and classrooms are chaos; the reason the company has compounded since 2016 is that the software keeps its promises every school day.

If you learned to code alone at 1am from forum posts, Chase's whole career is the version of that story where you turn around and pave the road behind you. We are for it.