DAZN IS SPONSORING CODE FIRST GIRLS!
I had the pleasure of joining some other amazing ladies at DAZN to deliver DAZN’s first online session for code first girls.
Through its coding, mentorship and upskill programmes, Code First Girls is providing initiatives to support women in tech — including access to top female talent, engaging workshops and upskilling. It is a social enterprise which has taught over 20,000 young women how to code in the UK and is the largest provider of free coding courses for women, having delivered over £14million worth of free technology education.
Code First Girls recently announced new strategic partnerships with 14 leading global and UK corporations including DAZN.
These new partnerships bring a breadth and depth of industries that can access Code First Girls courses, including engineering, telecommunications, software solutions, insurance, banking, media and more. By providing a diverse range of industries, Code First Girls is making pursuing a career in technology more accessible for all women, whilst showcasing the various pathways that can be taken to build a successful career, regardless of educational background.
Following on from the talk we did as a part of CodeFest: 2020, this year DAZN Engineering is excited to be embarking on this partnership with Code First Girls and we kicked it off with our first MOOC (Mass Open Online Course) on 25th February. Our one hour session was entitled DevTools in the Browser and was run by Naomi Gaynor, Platform Engineer and Jade Ryan, Software Engineer.
Naomi began by showing the dev tools which are available to play around with in your browser, this is a great place for a beginner to start experimenting and looking at debugging. She demonstrated how to inspect the main elements which a webpage is made up of, explaining HTML CSS and JavaScript.
Jade then took over to talk about the devices, network and application tabs within the browser developer tools which is useful for designing websites for different screen sizes.
Kaja Polkowska (Software Engineer) was also helping on the session by answering questions in the chat box and posting recommended resources.
After the MOOC session, myself, Helen Humphries (Principal Engineer) and Natalia Kluska (Engineering Manger), came into the live stream to talk about life at DAZN and our individual journeys, and answer questions about what it has been like for us as females working in the tech industry.
I was particularly excited to be a part of this first session as it marked the beginning of my own personal journey into tech as I begin transitioning from a Team Assistant to a Junior Platform Engineer in the DX team.
I spoke about how I studied computing at college and university but didn’t ever feel the motivation or encouragement to pursue a career in tech and so went on to have a ten year career as a Hairdresser.
Getting back into tech has been a long road starting from working as a Receptionist for tech-start ups to becoming an Executive Assistant for a tech founder and then finally joining DAZN as a Team Assistant for the Product Engineering department. I have now been given an amazing opportunity to fully join an Engineering team in DAZN and I am so excited to reboot my passion for all things tech and get back into development. It has taken me a long time to get here but I am so happy to be embarking on this new journey.
My message for anyone who is looking for a career change or has an interest in tech and doesn’t know where to start is that if I can do it then anyone can! There are loads of great resources online for self learning and finding a company like DAZN who are willing to invest time and help you to progress is key - I am very lucky to be surrounded by a really supportive team and manager. Most importantly is that you need to believe in yourself and be super pro-active and get involved with as much as you can.
Many thanks to Maryam Azarin for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this great initiative, please reach out to her if you would like to get involved with future CFG sessions.
You can watch back our first MOOC in full here!
If you want to read more about our new partnership with CFG you can read the press release here.
