The best part was returning to the same HTML/CSS workshop a year later but as a volunteer TA this time.
Student Feature — Jessie Wu
Jessie Wu first started learning programming at Girl Develop It SF’s two-day HTML/CSS workshop in 2014. After receiving a $2500 scholarship, Jessie went on to study at Dev Bootcamp, a full-time web immersive coding school while continue taking classes with Girl Develop It.
Today, Jessie works as a junior developer for a startup in San Francisco and volunteers at GDI workshops as a Teaching Assistant.
What got you into tech ?
My first unofficial coding experience was copying and pasting code for my Myspace and writing inline styling for my Livejournal posts in high school. I also took an XHTML course in college. I got my bachelor’s in Management Science from UC San Diego where I dealt with a lot of algorithms, analysis, and statistics.
After going through all that, I realized I wasn’t a math person. I decided to pull an Eat Pray Love moment and went abroad to find myself, Brazil in particular. But all I did really was work a lot and get fat from the amazing Brazilian food, so I decided to come back to California and find myself in San Francisco.
With my education background in logic and problem-solving coupled with my love for design, I finally found myself in front end web development.
Fast forward five years — I graduated from Dev Bootcamp, a coding school in April and just started my first developer job as a full-stack Junior Developer at Propel(x), an investing platform startup in San Francisco. I am currently working on decoupling our app with Rails and Ember and coding the new design of our homepage.
How did you hear about Girl Develop It?
I found Girl Develop It through meetup.com. It was one of the very few organizations that regularly held workshops and events in San Francisco.
What attracted you to GDI?
What initially attracted to me to GDI was the lineup of front-end workshops offered, but really got me attending almost every meetup were the organizers and women who made up Girl Develop It. You start becoming friends with other members, because you start running into each other at Meetups. It is so cool to see how your circle of network is expanding!
As for the GDI instructors, it’s really admirable that they have a different range of developers: some come from the traditional Computer Science degree background and some were self-taught, all have industry experience. I love workshops taught by Pamela Fox. She is such a badass programmer!
I also started recognizing Brenda Jin and Bianca Gandolfo in video tutorials and would run into Mary-Ann Jawili at tech conferences. I remember taking a workshop by Liz Howard and realized who she was when she told us her @lizthedeveloper handle — a lot of women retweet her posts. All of them are so active in the tech community.
You start becoming friends with other members because you start running into each other at meetups. It is so cool to see how your circle of network is expanding!
Which classes did you take?
My first workshop was a two-day GDISF HTML/CSS workshop in 2014, which was actually the turning point for me. It was only after the workshop, after being in a learning environment with other motivated students and supportive teachers, that I decided to apply to Dev Bootcamp, a full-time web immersive coding school.
I’ve also taken the Javascript series Client-side APIs and Backbone.JS after I graduated from Dev Bootcamp. The Backbone workshop actually helped me complete a coding challenge and move on to the next round of interviews for job interviews, thanks GDI!
The best part was returning to the same HTML/CSS workshop a year later but as a volunteer TA this time. For someone entering the tech field, so much can happen in just one year to someone learning to program — I went from making static websites for my friends as a hobby to studying programming full-time to building apps to getting my first developer job.
How did you like the classes ?
The classes were amazing!
“If you’re stuck and you are feeling down about it, just know it’s normal. All of us, even the brightest programmers, get stuck.”
What advice would you give to beginners?
If you’re stuck and you are feeling down about it, just know it’s normal. All of us, even the brightest programmers, get stuck. Programming wouldn’t be so rewarding if every line of code we wrote worked flawlessly.
If you are really doubting yourself, just remember that you know a lot more now than the month before and you will know a lot more in the months ahead. Take a deep breath, walk through your code, then walk away from your code for a mental break, and then come back to it.
What helped you the most when you were learning to code ?
What has helped me the most is walking through my code with someone else. Sometimes when I am explaining each step, I find the error along the way. There is some kind of magic where just having another person around makes the code work.
I love it when that happens, even though the other person would just be like “I have no idea what just happened, but I’m glad I was able to help by just sitting here.”
I heard this saying during Dev Bootcamp: when in doubt, “p” it out. This is a Ruby reference where you debug by printing things on the screen to see what output you’re getting. Sometimes you’re so fixated on something that you kind of lose track of everything else, so if you print and see what you’re working with. If you’re in Javascript, you console.log it.
Girl Develop It SF is the San Francisco chapter of Girl Develop It — we’re a nonprofit organization that provides affordable, judgment-free opportunities for women interested in learning web and software development.
Today we empower over 1,000 students per month nationwide with coding skills and community support to continue learning.
Check out our upcoming workshops on our Meetup.com page, and follow us on Twitter (@gdisf), Facebook and Instagram.
