Women can hack(athon) too
When Anne Boden, the founder of Starling Bank comes up to you at your first hackathon and says “You have to make an impact this weekend”, it doesn’t put much pressure on your team… Especially if you are the only all-women team there, new to programming and just there to learn and eat pizza. 😱
Earlier that evening I had walked into Google Campus, straight into a room which looked like this…
I know there is a huge and serious problem with diversity in tech, but I was still shocked at the complete lack of women participants at this event. Out of hundreds of people there were about six women there, including the four in my team. And then I realised — my echo chamber of ‘women in tech’ Meetups, diverse Twitter feeds and workplace at Decoded, had been sheltering me from this reality. I finally realised, “This is what they are all talking about”.
But this won’t be the last time I go to one and I feel confident that the diversity of hackathons will improve. Although our team became the token non-male team to be Tweeted that weekend, we had an overwhelmingly positive experience. It won’t be my last one and so I would like to spread the word.
If you are a woman working in technology here are three reasons why you should try out a hackathon at least once. Especially if (like me), you are new to programming, teaching yourself and would not usually spend all weekend indoors if you can help it.
1. You will learn more in a few days than in a whole month of self-learning
Before this weekend the closest I had come to an API was importing a Google Font. I had looked at Heroku before, but didn’t really understand what it was for. I had read about machine learning in blogs and it seemed like something best left to Elon Musk. I knew about all these tools and technologies and could confidently talk about them in theory. But hadn’t coded anything more complicated than a simple web page from scratch before. But in 12 hours, our team built a working customer service chatbot for Starling Bank customers. We used Wit.ai, a machine learning framework to build a Node.js application that powered a Facebook Messenger bot. It can respond to simple requests such as “What’s my balance?” and “How much did I spend yesterday?” using the Starling APIs. And it actually works! 💪
We were even more proud of ourselves, as we seemed to be one of the only teams there not part of an existing bank or FinTech team. No bother. We confidently pitched our product demo, with positive feedback from the judges and audience.
2. You will meet a bajillion (mostly) cool people
It was the first time our team had all met in person. We had connected separately though various London Meetups like Codebar, West London Coders and Ladies Who Code. We shared a new found love for learning to code and thought a hackathon would be a great experience.
It was. In between banging my head against the table when my Heroku app was down for the fourth time and finally writing a working JavaScript function; we laughed, got to know each other and built a digital product from scratch. We also met friendly, interesting and supportive developers, designers and entrepreneurs from all over the world.
With the exception of the ‘Pitch Doctor’ (please try not to fall down as you physically cringe here). Who asked us, “Do you have any developers on your team, maybe they can help you?”. Umm we are the developers, thanks mate.
BUT this is why it’s even more important that we attend these events. So women are visible. Which brings me onto the most important reason you should attend a hackathon in the future…
3. You will transform the face of tech
Because if more women don’t go to these events how will the industry know we are there? Starling Bank themselves are an inclusive, diverse company with the founder Anne and Chief Platform Officer, Megan Caywood championing female participation in this field. So it was disappointing and unexpected to be one of only a handful of women to attend.
I am so proud of the work that we did this weekend and can’t wait to participate in one again in the future.
But what really concerns me is this genuine response from a good friend of mine when I asked if she would come with me next time. She is a senior developer at a global investment bank and has been in the industry for seven years…
“I’d love to go to a hackathon, but I’m scared! I’d be rubbish.”
She would not be rubbish. She would be awesome. And so would you. It’s not about winning the pitch or building the most technically complicated thing. But who you meet, what you learn and if you can do that whilst standing up for diversity, then high fives to you my friend.
Thanks to my first hackathon team Jo, Charlene and Funmi, seriously awesome, talented ladies and to Starling Bank for hosting a great event.
Disagree? Agree? Wanna come with me next time? Let’s chat! 🙋 @sheldon_brien. Product Owner at Decoded and coding newbie.
