Introducing The Bit — We Pair Women Together to Tackle Technical Challenges and Learn New Skills
Every night since SheHacks, I’ve stayed up late at night thinking about how I can replicate the incredible experience of an all-female hackathon online. Specifically, how I can make exploration, mentorship, and empowerment for beginner coders more accessible.
Using my experience as a beginner programmer, I’ve been able to identify a solution that I believe will help solve several critical issues causing the gender gap in technology.
To share this idea, I’d like to begin by telling you a story about the time I tried to build a full stack web application with no experience.
The project began with an idea inspired by Brad Tober, an associate professor in the Communications school at Boston University. Since my freshman year, I’ve always admired Brad’s ability to mix communications and computer science. Specifically, I was impressed by his project “Design by Tweet” that enables Twitter users to collaboratively code visual compositions by writing tweets that use a simple Processing-inspired API.
Inspired by Brad’s ability to mix social media and coding, I decided to recreate my own version of his project for Red Hat, the tech company where I work. I wanted to create an open source project called “Collaborate by Code” that taught the principles of open source to the Red Hat community in an engaging and innovative way. The application would also allow users to add code from social media and see their contributions on a shared canvas.
The problem with recreating Brad’s project to fulfill my own ambitions was that there were no instructions on how he built the application or a GitHub repository that I could use as a starting point. Instead, I had to first figure out how he built it and then make my own program from scratch. I could have asked him, but that wouldn’t have been fun and I certainly wouldn’t have learned as much.
Since I had very minimal coding experience, I began the project like any other beginner coder — googling every word I came across in poor tutorials, copying code from random places online, breaking my application every time I tried to write an original piece of code, and of course spamming all my programmer friends with my problems.
In retrospect, I would not have been able to build Collaborate By Code without the support of my friends and mentors. Without their relentless support and encouragement, I would not have been able to overcome the many challenges I encountered that often felt impossible to solve.
There are many women like me, who also aspire to build technology and learn new technical skills. However, many of them don’t have the same level of support from friends and mentors.
It is for this reason, I co-founded -
The Bit, an online platform for women to gain relevant programming skills by completing curated tutorials with other women.
Learning how to code is hard, but we can make it easier by doing it together.
I’m excited to see where this idea takes me and I’m grateful to share this experience with my teammates James Quinlan, Candace Williams and the 50+ members on the SheHacks team, who support me every day on my entrepreneurial journey.
For more information about our venture and to sign up for our beta, visit: thebit.blog.
