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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).
Why Did You Leave Teaching for Web Development?
This is a question I’ve gotten asked a lot in my quest to change careers. If you’ve ever worked in education, especially as a teacher, you no doubt already have some ideas about what my answer will be. If you haven’t, here’s the explanation:
First, I decided I needed to leave teaching. I was looking for something that involved less direct “customer contact”, was more financially viable for a single person in Seattle, and was related to tech (a growing field with endless things to learn about). I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into instructional design, engineering, project management, or technical writing, so I took some time to explore.
After interviewing career advisors, multiple tech-related departments at UW, taking informal Web Design courses, and talking to my friends in various careers, I decided to take the intro CSE courses at UW (starting with Java) while continuing to teach. Not only did I pass said course, I found it wonderfully challenging and relevant. I took another, this time in web programming, and I loved it. I felt powerful. I felt like I actually accomplished something. I felt like I was learning and enjoying working with others. Programming is about language just as much as teaching ESL. Syntax, semantics, vocabulary, grammar. They are all related. I’m just happy I didn’t wait any longer than I did to make the switch.
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.
Obligatory New Year’s Post
What I’m most excited for this year:
Another great year in a great house with a great dog and a host of great friends and family coming and going. Here’s to wassail!
Learning even more about coding and web development: currently taking a Udacity Mobile Web course online and a Python course through Girl Develop It (who are awesome) “irl”. I can never decide if using “irl” makes me sound like I’m stuck somewhere in ICQ circa 1998 or like I’m an awesome text-savvy social media user not a day over 25. Hmmmm…
Ramping up career from intern/learner/networker/experimenter to full-time-employee/learner/networker/experimenter. Hint, hint.
And in case you were wondering how long I would go with just “the girl the dog”, I am finally being well-distracted from my increasing nerdiness on weekends by, you guessed, it, “the boyfriend”(!!!). So that is one other, non-code-related item that turns out to make everything in this new year just that much brighter.
Happy New Year!
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
Christmas is over. So why haven’t I taken down my extraordinary (pink) Christmas tree? If the preceeding question doesn’t answer itself, then we have nothing left to talk about.
But I wanted to explain (read: brag about) my awesome side projects (Christmas presents) that were done in addition to completing a quarter at school and setting up an entirely new website at the internship (to go live sometime this month!).
First challenge: A “Worry Wart” website for Mom/every woman in the world to store worries for them. This needed a database, tables interacting with each other, a somewhat secure way to access, read, and write to the database, login, log out, create a new user, store session variables, count worries that came true vs worries that never happened, add and delete worries. Whew! I think that might be about it.
If you’re interested, check out worrywart.jessicawicksnin.com. If you’re really interested, check out my code on git hub (jwicksnin).
Second challenge: A “Benjamin Speaks” app for Dad/every retirement-savvy person to aid them in financial decision making. This took CSS to create a neat shadowed “quote bubble” and awesome jQuery to take a submitted question, find a suitable (random) answer in a text file, and output the random answer. Nothing too fancy, but the image of a $100 bill that I gleaned from Google addressing my dad directly is really cute.
Third challenge: A “Facebook for Two” for my boyfriend/every couple who too busy actually having a relationship “IRL” to document every stage of their relationship on actual Facebook. This took some serious JavaScript because a text file wasn’t good enough – I was determined to use the word AJAX as much as possible. I ended up using a quick PHP file to write from JavaScript to the existing XML file on the server. So now I feel very comfortable reading and writing XML files based on user input via AJAX requests. It’s basically a poorly-styled Facebook, which made me question the value of Facebook at $100,000(?) a share if I can build the same thing in a couple weeks with nothing but Google and Web Programming Step by Step (thank you CSE at UW) for help.
Even the Spice Girls Didn’t Have This Much "Girl Power"
If you are a woman in Seattle, you can’t not learn web development. It is prolific, ubiquitous, pervasive, easy, and inexpensive-to-free. In the past week, for a total of $100 plus bus fare, I have attended:
JS Seattle Meetup’s Free jQuery training held at picturesque Red Fin
Girl Develop It’s HTML5 and CSS3 eight hour course
Seattle Tech Meetup (at least the first hour before intensive day job had me sleep walking back to the bus)
RailsBridge Seattle weekend intensive Ruby on Rails workshop (we made an app!)
Awesome post-workshop happy hour sponsored by BlueBox (they deserve the plug because we got free margaritas)
And I have learned:
- Basic jQuery commands that I can now apply to JavaScript
- That my entire website made so proudly by hand now needs to be changed completely to make the most of the awesome-ness of HTML5 and CSS3 (will be done as soon as said intensive day job is finished this week!!!)
- Why Ruby on Rails is easy but also very different from the other languages I’ve used
- That I know enough about programming to self-select the “advanced” section for the Rails workshop and be successful there
- That I still have so much to learn!
But mostly, I have been so inspired by all the awesome people I have met at these events and classes. And I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to get a job writing sappy greeting cards. Meeting other people, especially women, who share my same goals and interests makes me feel so much less adrift in this crazy life and career change. New goal: one day to be a volunteer at these events as a “TA”.
Thank you, Seattle!
Oh My God, It Works!
If you’ve ever tried to program something, uploaded the new version of the file, and sat biting your nails while the page slowly, slowly refreshes, and you hope that the error is something as simples as:
Not Found
The requested URL /doggie.html was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
But will probably go more along the lines of:
Then when you open one squinted eye to see which error it was, and the code actually works and something cool and functional is happening in your site, well, you can only gasp,
“Oh My God It Works!”
Maybe followed by your own “Mwah ha ha ha, in your face computer” and a little victory dance that makes your dog glare at you for interrupting her afternoon siesta.
This is what just happened to me when trying to translate a page from regular JavaScript to jQuery (yes, this is my idea of fun on a Saturday afternoon) and is why I *heart* JavaScript and jQuery SO MUCH.
Be Still My Beating Heart
This morning my mind was blown. I read a chapter about J Query and understood it! I also understood how to combine “unobtrusive” with “J Query” and so one of my big goals now is to eradicate regular JavaScript from my own page (not from my portfolio pieces) while maintaining separate JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files. I realized I am beginning a love affair with J Query because while I was brushing my teeth because I kept fantasizing about all the wonderful things J Query and I will do together this summer. Me and J Query getting Ajax. Me and J Query listening for events. Me and J Query creating children (and appending them!). Gee, I hope J Query likes the way I fixed my hair today…
One day, my dream is to use PHP to do cool stuff, which will probably start with making user names and passwords. The great thing (warning: sarcasm ahead) about this is that I can also use REGULAR EXPRESSIONS. I don’t know why they called them that, but the abbreviated Regex (read: Rejects) is much more apt. It’s not that I don’t love REGULAR EXPRESSIONS (who continue to insist that I write them all in CAPS in addition to personifying them), it’s just that they make me so depressed I actually want to tear the pink keyboard cover from my computer. And that is saying something.
Another challenge I actually am excited about is the magic wand of HTTP Special Chars. If you’re not sure what that means, I will tell you. Generation Y people think they’re really special because their guilt-ridden divorced parents continually told them so. HTTP Chars actually are Special because they will encrypt your s**t. While I may not be the Marines of web security, I think I could at least pass for a mall cop because in addition to those Chars that are Special, I have some other tricks up my sleeve. And those tricks involve many acronyms that I can’t remember right now.
Well, I’m off to go spend the afternoon on the couch (and the dining room table, and the kitchen, and my desk) with J Query. Please hold my calls.
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