How I organised a coding workshop for women
…and didn’t completely suck at it
I had always enjoyed attending women’s workshops such as Rails Girls and Django girls, and was a regular at Women Who Code (WWC) Brisbane’s monthly meetup. I had just started learning JavaScript for my job as a graduate software engineer, and I wanted to find a similar community of women to learn JavaScript with.
I was ecstatic when I stumbled upon NodeGirls Australia — an organisation that holds free women’s JavaScript workshops. However, my excitement was short-lived as I scrolled through the “events” page, only to realise that there was no NodeGirls in Brisbane. I was heart-broken when the founder Tanya wrote back to me explaining how she was stretched too thin to conduct workshops in Brisbane, alongside managing the existing chapters in Melbourne and Sydney. I was prepared to seek other ways to start learning more about JavaScript and NodeJS, but some things changed my mind.
I found the 2016 Stack Overflow statistics:
More people use JavaScript than use any other programming language. PHP appears to be falling out of favor as Node and Angular emerge.
But a stark contrast to the soaring stats for JavaScript in software was that of the number of women employed in the field. It couldn’t be that women just happened to be less interested in software or coding. I had always loved coding, starting from my very first “hello world” program. However, I preferred learning in a female-friendly environment. It felt like a secure learning space. I felt less conscious of my shortcomings as a coder than I did in a male-dominated environment. I wondered how many other women felt this way — how many women didn’t enter the field because the environment didn’t seem welcoming for a woman starting off?
I decided I wanted to do something about it. This, along with my desire to learn more about NodeJS drove me to take on the role of lead organiser for the Brisbane chapter of NodeGirls Australia, and I’d like to share a few of the many things that I learnt along the way, and that helped me bring this event together.
Be a mentor
As Tim Minchin says in his graduation speech —
Even if you’re not a teacher, be a teacher.
Especially if you think you don’t have much to offer — be a teacher. Mentor kids to learn how to code using scratch, or volunteer as a mentor at coding workshops near you. Tutor a kid who’s interested in coding. Teaching kids is great because it forces you to understand things in a way that you can explain them simply, which is the key to understanding things well.
Being a mentor, especially when you don’t see yourself as one, is an incredibly efficient way to learn about yourself. It’s the fastest and most efficient way to realise how much you know that you don’t give yourself credit for. I’ve definitely found that I don’t realise how well I understand something until someone asks me to explain it to them.
I also feel like I am obligated to understand a topic better when someone else is relying on me to explain it to them. It sounds funny, but it works — the pressure of having to explain what NodeJS is, and why it is used, in front of 40 odd people, made me learn things a lot more thoroughly and in-depth. But it’s also important to know where to draw the line, which leads us to the fact that …
You don’t have to know everything.
It sounds cliche. But its a difficult one to remember when you’re surrounded by people who just seem to know it all. This notion that we need to know everything holds us back from the actual doing of things. The secret is not to know everything, but to know how to know everything. In the age of Stack Overflow answering your questions before you even knew you had them, and thousands of free or reasonably priced courses on everything and anything that you’re interested in, there is no lack of learning resources. Start with something, anything — and when you are stuck, there’s doctor Google to the rescue. Whatever questions or problems you have, seek comfort in knowing that you are most definitely not the first person to ask them on the internet.
If I had waited until I knew everything about NodeJS to announce the first Brisbane event, I don’t think I would’ve announced it yet!
Chances are that your journey to whatever your goal is won’t be “perfect”, you’ll discover several gaps you’ll have to fill as you progress. But this isn’t a bad thing, which brings us to the next point…
Dont be so afraid of failure
Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code has a brilliant Ted talk where she speaks about how we teach little girls to be perfect, and little boys to be brave.
Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. They’re taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A’s.
Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off headfirst.
With software being the fast paced ever-changing industry that it is, no wonder women don’t attempt to enter it when they have been trained by society to be “overly cautious” and “aspire for perfection”.
This was an especially difficult one for me — I often worried about the event not being perfect, or being called out on being an impostor. After all, I didn’t know a thing about NodeJS 4 months before the event! I had to repeatedly remind myself, that this was all an experience, and that the worst case scenario is that I put together an event that brings together a lot of like minded people… and that isn’t a bad worst case to have at all :)
This is why we didn’t mention the coding level in the workshop description — As soon as you mention the word “intermediate”, people start doubting whether this is the right event for them. My aim was to show women, that even though they might not view themselves as a person with intermediate skills, they won’t really know if they are unless they try it out.
Get comfortable with making noise
This one was a tough one for me to begin with, especially because I would define myself as an introvert. Personality tests have always classified me as an introvert. So it wasn’t exactly shocking to me when I discovered that getting people to notice this event wasn’t one of my strong suits — and it definitely wasn’t the easiest thing on my to-do list. I treated my ability to socialise like a muscle — I believed that as long as I keep exercising it, I’ll get better at it. I signed up as mentor at Coderdojo Brisbane, I attended as many coding meetups as possible, I attended hackathons. I basically forced myself to be social. I discovered the power of twitter. Luckily I already had a couple of lovely friends, who from day 1 were 100% committed in co-organising NodeGirls with me.
Laura is our star designer who is incredibly proactive in managing all the digital media for the workshop. Armagan has an amazing ability to explain even the hardest things so beautifully and simply. She is also one of the most social and kind people that I know. She put together a very successful fundraising potluck for NodeGirls at Red Hat, which ended up paying for a big part of the event.
Together we formed a strong team, with each of us having our own specialised responsibilities. But socialising in the various events is how I found the network of people who ended up being the support I needed to make this event happen.
And finally…
You can’t please everyone
This is coming from a glass-half-empty kind of person — I’m the kind of person who would fixate on a handful of negative responses amongst all the positive ones in a survey. I learnt through organising this event that there are a large number of people with a diverse set of skills who will attend such workshops. To try to cater to each and every single need is an impractical goal. So while I would 100% recommend you to seek feedback for the event, I would also say that you shouldn’t get disheartened by every negative feedback you receive.
It’s important to reflect on all the feedback, and exchange your takes on them with your team, and then classify the improvement advice as feasible or unfeasible based on your goals. And it’s equally important to celebrate the positive feedback as well :)
