London Rails Girls 2018
Rails Girls is a free workshop aimed at making technology more approachable for women — https://railsgirls.london/. It’s a free workshop where participants can learn sketching, prototyping, basic programming and get introduced to the world of technology, in a safe environment.
Smart Pension was one of the sponsors of the event and over 80% of the Engineering team volunteered their Friday night and all day Saturday to be coaches at the event. Plus some of HR team and other members also attended to learn how to code!
One of the things that we shared with some of the students, learning as a programmer never ends. While helping people learn how to build an application, most of us learnt something new (granted for a lot of the developers who use a mac, it was how to edit host files on a windows machine). One of the best ways to actually see how deep your understanding of a subject, is to explain it to someone who is learning.
I gave a short talk about the Engineering culture at Smart Pension, one of our Engineers recently said, “The Software that we are building, will be used 10, 20, 40, 50 or maybe even 100 years from now — we need to build it right or future engineers will hunt me down”. More importantly chatted about how building complicated software is a much more collaborative than most people realise until they start working in an Engineering team. For example, most PR’s are reviewed by over 90% of the Engineering team (okay, as we scale in size of people, that isn’t going to continue!)
From a personal level, my girlfriends daughter, Lexie (11 years old) attended the event. She didn’t have any experience in building an application, nor of coding and at the end of it she had an application up and running. She had this to say about the incredible coaches at the event. Most importantly she also saw a lot of people who had gone through a few challenges to learn how to be engineers — positive role models are so important!
Feedback that I head from a lot of attendees, it was helpful for people to work with similar people, to find out that we all sometimes had a case of impostor syndrome, and also get new found confidence in their abilities.
Interested in signing up for the next event? Check out https://railsgirls.london/
It’s highly likely a lot of the Smart Pension Engineering team will be there next time, so come say hello!
