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Geeks Girls Carrots Mentoring
One of my fave meetup groups has always been Geek Girls Carrots (not to be confused with Girl Geek Dinners, another awesome networking/professional development group with equally awesome food and locations). Last spring, Geek Girls Carrots led the second of the Code Carrots courses. Ladies with any level of programming experience come together, form groups, pick an “app” to develop, decide which stack to use, follow an “agile” schedule of week-long sprints, and work with a mentor to advise on all of the above. I was lucky enough to be one of those mentors to a group of four ladies working on a Django project related to reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.
The main challenge here was time. We all worked full-time, and met after work once or twice a week. There was rarely a week when all group members could meet in person at the same time. I set up a Slack account for us to use, and it really helped when one or two group members were remote. I was also a git/github resource – such a tricky technology to novice programmers to get used to. It’s hard to keep the cognitive load low enough for actual learning – trying to use git correctly, not “break everything”, get code to work, and write code well at the same time (as any developer knows, even when years into their career).
In fact, on the first day of the project, I was called on to do an impromptu intro class to using git and github to the whole group of about twenty women. Let me clarify – I had zero idea I was going to do this until the organizers said, “Jessica! You know github, right?”. It was really challenging, but really fun, and reminded me of what I enjoyed about teaching. By the end of the class, everyone was able to clone a repo and contribute to it. Success!
After eight weeks, all the groups presented their projects. All had a working prototype, and many had one hosted online, like Heroku. It was a great experience that I hope they repeat soon (nudge, nudge).
Volunteering at Ada Developers Academy
One of my goals during my career transition to tech was to be a mentor and role model for other women who wanted to transition to a better career. Luckily, I’ve been able to do that formally in two wonderful contexts (see my post on Geek Girls Carrots Code Carrots 2.0 mentoring), and informally in dozens more.
Currently, I have the privilege of being able to TA with Ada Developers Academy. If you’re not familiar with Ada, here is the info.
I spend five hours every other week helping new developers on their coding projects. Depending on the stage of the cohort, it could be working through nested loops in Rails or trying to figure out how to stub an API response in a new testing framework, or even trying to plan a long-term capstone project. I even recently taught a fellow volunteer how to write his first React.js app in our down time. Frequently, I’m a live rubber duck for students to work through problems out loud. Most importantly, I’m an empathetic ear who has definitely been through these same frustrations and come out a better developer in the end.
Ulterior Motives
It’s funny. You never hear the word “ulterior” unless it’s collocated (associated) with “motives”. I guess it means “hidden”, “not obvious” or even “devious”? You hear a lot about exterior and interior, but how “ulterior” fits in is not entirely clear.
Anyway, you may have heard the expression, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Regardless of the fact that this was coined somewhere around 1930 when indeed, free lunches were hard to come by, in the tech community in Seattle you might change it to “There’s no such thing as a free beer.” But actually, this week, I have indeed enjoyed both free beer and a free lunch. Oh, and a free JavaScript tutorial from an actual human being!
On Monday, I joined the “Learn JavaScript the Right Way” meetup in Ballard to go over homework assignments. One highlight was drinking hot chocolate in a tea shop. Another highlight was breaking Code Academy via an infinite loop in one of their JavaScript exercises. Surprising, because I’m sure I’m not the first person to write an infinite loop on Code Academy. A further highlight was the helpful spirit and community feel of the meetup. We had one “expert” who happily answered all our silly (and not so silly) questions. We shared resources, and I’m really looking forward to next week!
On Tuesday, it was South Lake Union for Code Fellows’ open house. You’ve no doubt heard of these coding “bootcamps” and have strong opinions about them. Let’s skip that. I mostly wanted to see what the place was like, how it compared to another for-profit school (that may or may not contain the letters “ITT” in the name), and get the aforementioned free beer. Check, check, and check. Way more legit than the unnamed school (I used to work there so I guess I’d know), and totally relevant to Seattle’s job market. Wow, I’m kind of talking myself into applying as I write this. If anyone would like to “sponsor” me, I can promise you free access to my blog posts for life.
On Wednesday, it was to “Impact HUB” (not to be confused with The Hub at UW), located on the block in Seattle that receive more 911 reports than any other single street. Awesome. Despite subtly closed blinds and muffled homeless yelling across the street, we enjoyed an 8+ hour workshop on using PhoneGap, Apigee, and Codiqa to create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and jQuery (and jQuery mobile). And that’s where the free lunch comes in. I got much more comfortable with the command line, learned more about jQuery mobile (although I’m not sure how much of a “thing” it really is), and am psyched to see Worry Wart in an app store near you soon.
So I’m sorry to say that I am very cynical and fully expected a “pitch” at both Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s events. I even had my cynical face on, which I’m making at this very moment. Since I don’t want to scare you away, I’ll just pretend that this Mac doesn’t have a camera built in right now. Luckily, I was proven wrong, and on top of free beer and a free lunch, I met some cool people and learned some cool things. And I’ll stop there because based on that last sentence, I’m running out of adjectives.
Professional Development…
…Shouldn’t be this FUN.
I feel like I am leading a double life, between two HUBs – Husky Union Building, where I’ve spent so many great lunches with friends and The Daily, and HUB Seattle, an unlikely building between the ID and Pioneer Square that apparently hosts every tech event advertised on Meetup.
Last night enjoyed a few bites, beers, and new connections with the Seattle Tech Meetup at HUB Seattle. Boy was I glad I sprang for the higher-end Avery do-it-yourself business cards. It’s so cool to see what kind of culture I am (hopefully) becoming part of. As we were led in a cheer, I felt like I was back in hall council for McNary dorm at Oregon State University, only better, because I didn’t have to hide my beer from the RA.
This afternoon the air conditioning was working much better at HUB as I joined a pack of aspiring mobile developers learning about making a mobile app in less than four hours! For free! (Thank you Apigee). Once again we were plied with food and promised beer afterward if we could just get PhoneGap to work. For me, it was empowering to realize that I can keep up with gainfully employed developers and even helped them in a few places. I even solved a JavaScript conundrum within the time allowed! Just append a few
s and….
Anyway, before this digresses into total geekdom (as I have noticed many of my social conversations have done lately), I just want to say Thank You to both HUBs in my life for all the education and support.
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