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).