Earn & Learn associate Joel Hooimeyer shares his experience winning the WiseTech Global Programming Competition and how AI is reshaping software engineering at WiseTech Sydney.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of students learn to code on Grok Academy, with thousands of those students registering to participate in the inaugural WiseTech Global Programming Competition in 2025.
For some, it’s a chance to test their programming skills. For others, it’s a springboard into a tech career. Joel Hooimeyer is one of the latter. Now an Associate Software Engineer at WiseTech Global through our Earn & Learn program, he started out as a curious child tinkering with Scratch.
We asked him about his journey from first lines of code to full-time engineering, and what he wanted to share with others who, like him, dream of a future working in tech.
“Give every opportunity you get a shot; the worst that can happen is you fail and move on to the next.”
What first sparked your interest in programming?
I've been interested in computing from a young age. Eventually I discovered platforms such as Scratch, which I remember spending a fair bit of time with. Over time, mostly through YouTube videos and tutorials, I found things like MCreator (a no-code Minecraft mod builder) and Visual Studio's WYSIWYG WinForms designer. I had no clue what I was doing with Visual Basic, but it let me mess around with GUIs, even if they weren't very functional. Later I discovered Python and started to learn it, I don't quite remember whether it was through tutorials or books, or some combination of both. That led me to the Grok platform, around 2016-17.
How did Grok Academy and the WiseTech Global Programming Competition help you build your skills?
I first started using Grok outside of school to learn Python, following a recommendation from someone I knew. As for the competition, it gave me the motivation to practice with some LeetCode in the lead-up. Mostly, though, it served as an opportunity to prove the skills I'd built up over the years, both through personal projects and through non-competitive challenges and puzzles like Advent of Code and LeetCode.
What has surprised you most about Earn & Learn so far?
The degree to which individual contributions and ideas are valued. Whenever I've offered a fresh perspective on something, sometimes challenging the status quo, even having only been in the team for a few weeks, my ideas were always seriously considered. There was never any inertia based on things being the way they'd always been.
How is AI reshaping software engineering at WiseTech?
AI has shifted the bottleneck from writing code to engineering systems, allowing engineers to start planning their next task while the AI works. Rather than spending most of our time manually writing code, we focus on problem solving - thinking about higher-level architecture and requirements.
What would you tell a Year 12 student who enjoys problem solving and is curious about working in tech?
Give every opportunity you get a shot; the worst that can happen is you fail an opportunity and have to move on to the next one. For younger students, find a project that interests you, whether it's a Discord bot, a game mod, a game, an application you'd find useful, or anything else, and find some online resources to help you create it. It might not be perfect the first time, but over time you can refine it as your skills improve.
Australian high school students can register now for the 2026 WiseTech Global Programming Competition, competing for over $30,000 in cash prizes and the chance to visit WiseTech's Sydney headquarters. Selected participants may be invited to interview for WiseTech’s Earn & Learn program.
Find out more and register free for the WiseTech Global Programming Competition: WiseTech Global Programming Competition | Grok Academy