Our First Very Own Tech Meet-up
The SoC Bootcampers are spreading the word of code!
The day finally arrived last Thursday. After much organisation, stress and plenty of last-minute changes, it was time to enter Google’s Digital Garage In Birmingham City Centre and embark on an evening of coding fun and food!
We had our welcoming committee at the entrance(Morgan, Clare and Sina), to graciously usher in our guests. They ranged from people of all ages, some experienced coders, and most who had not seen a line of code in their lives!
They were then signed up by a few of this event’s lead organisers, Leigh and Pete, and away they went on their new & exciting coding experience.
We had 2 sessions, running side by side, for the 1st hour of this meet-up.
One was for beginners, who had never had any exposure to coding whatsoever, or those who felt they needed to brush up on their skills. This involved introducing HTML (Hypertext Markup Language — the building blocks of a webpage) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet — styling these building blocks to make them look more visually enticing to the user) to our guests, led by Ashleigh and Jennifer. Each participant had to redesign or put their own spin on a ‘Garfield cartoon sketch’ webpage. This proved a challenge for most at first, but everyone was successful in the end thanks to some brilliant teaching, and of course, all our knowledgeable Bootcampers who were on hand to assist with any problem, small or large!
The other session was for participants who had had some exposure to coding before — either by self-teaching or through employment — this involved learning the basics of JavaScript (makes the webpage interactive and dynamic) syntax and functions. Our enthusiastic guests eagerly absorbed all concepts and definitions thrown at them, and have also become masters in using the developer tools in Google Chrome! This session was led by myself and Christopher, and with plenty of help from fellow Bootcampers. We hope our group left this session with a sense of curiosity and motivation to carry on learning JavaScript themselves!
The 2nd hour of the meet-up was also very popular and productive — many of the participants had positive networking sessions amongst themselves, Google Digital Garage employees, and School of Code Bootcampers. It also didn’t hurt that there was plenty of free pizza to go around, to keep those energy levels up and running after the intense coding session!
We all know how important it is, career wise, to be able to network with our peers, employers and industry leaders effectively; so this was an important time for our meet-up guests to take advantage of discussing whatever they wanted to know about the coding and tech world. Be this in terms of current jobs, career change, getting your foot into the industry, issues with own coding projects, digitally market their ongoing projects/products, how to get into a coding bootcamp and what it involves — you name it, everything technological was juggled around the room. (I myself even found another enthusiast in medical technology — what a small world!)
All-in-all, from the feedback we received at the end of this meet-up, this was a real success, and all the guests were clamouring around us, asking the same question: “when is the next one going to be?”
I think I can safely say, on behalf of myself and all School of Code Bootcampers, that this meet-up would not have been possible without our fantastic lead organisers Ashleigh, Leigh, Pete and Victoria, and, of course, Google Digital Garage, for providing the venue and free pizza!
Also, a very big thank you to all the Bootcampers who helped with all coding sessions, and making our guests feel extremely welcome and motivated to code away!
Interested in future SoC Meetups? Join our page at meetup.com/School-of-Code-Meetup/ and keep your eye out for the next one!
