“Code Is Not Just about Computers, It’s About People”: Inspiring the Aspiring Young Women Coders of Afghanistan

Fereshteh Forough was born as an Afghan refugee in Iran during the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. One year after the Taliban regime collapsed, her family moved back to Herat, Afghanistan. After returning to Herat, Fersehteh earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and later her master’s from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany.

Fereshteh taught as a computer science professor at Herat University for three years. In January 2015, she founded the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan, Code to Inspire, with the mission of educating Afghan women with in-demand programming skills, empowering them to add unique value to their communities, and inspiring them to strive for financial and social independence.

SheWorx hosted a special virtual breakfast to bring the mentorship of engineers Jenna Zeigen and Viola Holownia, and Community Director Etel Sverdlov of Digital Ocean to the aspiring future female coders of Afghanistan, allowing them to really see and get the chance to discuss programming and tech with women who code for a living.

“Half of the people in the world are women! So you should make sure that the people making the stuff that the whole world is using represents that! Different perspectives help to make better things and to come up with better solutions,” said Jenna, on the importance of women in coding.

Jenna, Etel, and Viola shared their journeys into the tech space with the students. Viola picked up her interest from her father, who was an electrician passionate about math and physics. Jenna, though initially nervous about the difficulty level, was required to take a computer science course as a requirement for her major of cognitive science, and surprised herself by falling in love with it.

“Algorithms are really cool to me! Thinking about how to make them efficient ­– for some reason, I really liked that, and I liked making user interfaces. I thought it was really cool that I could use code to interact with people, essentially!” said Jenna. “When I found web programming, having that be so immediate was really interesting to me. I’m a front-end engineer by training, and I love it.”

The SheWorx mentors described the most interesting problems that they have worked on through out their careers, from sharing information online, content curation, and enhancing collaborative work, and shared the ways in which they have worked through challenges in coding, such as being able to pinpoint what the difficulty is exactly in programming problems, and having the perseverance and patience to solve them.

“Bugs are pesky, and you just gotta think out of the box sometimes to figure out: okay where is this coming form, in what circumstances is it happening?” said Jenna.

The Digital Ocean engineers also helped to answer the students’ questions, such as the programming languages used in their careers (Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Go, Pearl), and gave advice on how to hone their programming skills. Jenna advocated for trial and error and learning by making things and doing little projects.

Many students asked how they could become top programmers. For that, Jenna reminded everyone that “code is not just about computers, it’s about people.”

“Understanding how people think is also important ­– figuring out how other people use software and what other people want, what problems other people want solved but can’t solve themselves,” said Jenna.

“I think that’s the best way to really impact the most amount of people, and I think impacting people is how you get to be a top 1% programmer.”