codebar Festival 2023 Wrapped: The First Hybrid Edition
Our annual codebar Festival returned earlier this month with some fresh updates to the programme! We saw 700 of our community members come together for 5 days of technical workshops, talks, panels, and some yoga.
An Annual Festival, Refreshed
This year we changed things up a little. Instead of holding our usual 3-day Festival, we decided to spread the excitement over 5 days. There were 4 days of virtual technical workshops, followed by a full-day event. All sessions were available online and on the final day, participants had the option to meet in-person in London.
Our technical workshops consisted of:
- Bash it up: Scripts Simplifying Life (Not Javascript)
- Create a game in Javascript
- Figma For Everyone: Exploring Templates For Productivity, Organising, Note Taking And More!
These technical workshops allowed our community to dive deeper
into a particular topic.
The full-day event on Saturday consisted of 9 sessions — 7 talks, a panel, and a CV review. When we set out to run an in-person element, we knew it had to be available virtually as well. We didn’t want people to feel like they were watching a stream — we wanted them to feel like they were taking part in the event. To ensure this, we had a virtual host — Suze Shardlow — and an in-person host. Several of our speakers were virtual too!
New Perspectives from Expert Speakers
Each one of our speakers brought something special to the table, from talking about how the code we write is impacting our climate, to how we can build truly inclusive communities, to the know-hows of building secure websites. Our speakers were absolutely fabulous!
Nurturing a Thriving Community
There are several elements of codebar Festival that we are extremely proud of. The first is that we pay all our speakers — because we believe in giving back to the community. Every person who ran a session was paid £150, and all technical workshop leads were paid £250. This is the standard we expect in tech from other conferences and companies and if we, as a charity, can pay our speakers, so can you! The other thing we are proud of is being able to financially support 16 people to get to the in-person event, thanks to a donation by Substrakt. We are trying to break down as many barriers to tech as possible, and this is another way we’re doing that.
These payments would not have been possible without our wonderful sponsors — Contentful, J.P.Morgan, T. Rowe Price, and Substrakt. Without their support, we would not have been able to run the Festival so we’re sending you the biggest thank you. We also want to send a huge thank you to 10x Banking, who not only gave us their wonderful venue but also feed us and ensured everything was streamed out to our virtual audience.
If you missed any sessions they are currently being uploaded to our Youtube channel here.
We are always looking for more coaches to come on board and help
our students during our workshops. If you’re able to teach beginner
HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ruby or Python, please consider signing up
as a coach at https://codebar.io/.
I had a fantastic time, met some incredible people and looking already looking forward to next years!
Thank you for joining us and see you soon x
