Building a number guessing game — Girl Code at Codam
On the 18th of September, some 30 girls met up for the quarterly Girl Code Meetup, this time hosted at Codam.
The first challenge of the evening being finding the front door. However, once the front door was located, a bowl of hot tomato soup with bread and good conversation awaited. As a meetup regular, I cannot say how nice it was to get something other than pizza for once. It was a really nice touch.
After eating one too many pieces of bread with hummus, we headed into the auditorium where Ineke introduced Girl Code.
Once Ineke had done the official word of welcome, Michèle of Codam took over. She explained how she had gone from a general social sciences graduate to completing a boot camp and now working as a developer at Codam. She also introduced Codam, which is the first full-on coding school in Amsterdam. The curriculum is 3.5 years with 2 internships, before the release you into the wild. However, it is about there the resemblance with normal schooling ends. At Codam there are no teachers, no lectures and no books, only peer learning.
So true to Codams teaching philosophy, we got a short introduction to the concepts before we were led into the “clusters”. In the clusters, rows of iMacs awaited us along with a bunch of girls from Codam ready to assist.
The assignment was a small number guessing game, prompting the user to guess a randomly generated number. The exercise was a nice introduction to the basics of programming and for getting familiar with Ruby syntax. We got to try both control flow, reading input from the user and conditionals.
To make it even easier to get started, we used the website repl.it/languages/ruby, where you can create and run Ruby scripts in the browser.
Since there were girls of all skill levels, some programmed for the first time whilst others finished in no time. Fortunately, there was room for both types of programmers, with super helpful tutors to guide the first-timers and extra challenges for the experienced programmers.
One of the main takeaways for me was Michèle’s tip about writing out all the steps of the program before starting. It is a good reminder to take a step back and actually figure out what you are building before you dive in.
We got about an hour and a half to program, after which we rounded off the evening with a final word of thank you. Then for those who wanted to hang out and chat, there were drinks, stroopwafels and nuts. All in all, a really enjoyable evening in good company.
So thank you very much to Ineke for making this a nice evening happen and thank you to Michèle and the awesome team of helpers at Codam. Also, thank you to Tiffany for hosting and Marta for taking pictures 🤗
Now we just have to wait for the next one, which will be on “Anything NPM” on November 27th at Adyen.
Thank you for reading and maybe I’ll see you at the next Girl Code meetup!
PS. My solution to the exercise can be found here, should you want to compare.
The feedback form and the official solution can be found through this link.
