codebar Oxford’s 1 year birthday
In October 2016, codebar Oxford ran its first ever event! So, we thought we’d take a look back at our first year. We’ve been very busy. Over this time, we’ve ran 10 events and have seen over 125 workshop attendances. We ran a special micro:bit day-long workshop, with the CTO of the micro:bit foundation and one of our organisers, Bonnie, has been invited to PyCon to speak about the event.
We’ve had more coach interest than we can accommodate! We’ve seen lots of student regulars come back and learn more each time, and we’ve seen a great variety of students; from people with complex Python projects to complete beginners learning to code for the first time! Workshop highlights have been data scraping from a NASA website, a website all about Jim Carrey and an arpeggio made out of an apple!
We’ve gone from being run by just Beverley, to Marten, Bonnie and Ryan joining the organiser team, which has been fantastic. It has been hard at times, particularly with getting the word out about our workshops, but we’ve pushed through and we are optimistic about the future. We have some exciting plans, too.
The first of these exciting plans is that we are switching up our organiser team a bit. Some new faces are joining our organiser team! Lulu Phillips, who works in Communications and PR at Elsevier, will be joining us to help with promotion and publicity. Alex Bokii, Front End developer at OCC, will also be joining us to help out with event organisation. Sadly, Ryan Brooks will be leaving us — we’ve really enjoyed working with him over the past year and we are sad to see him go, but are excited for his future adventures.
The second exciting plan is that Oxford Computer Consultants have offered us a more permanent home! From now on, we will be hosting our workshops in the beautiful breakout space in their St Aldates office. We are looking forward to this move, and are grateful to OCC for this kind offer.
It has been a busy year, and we are proud of what we have achieved as a team and in the Oxford community. We are very excited about the upcoming year, to seeing our wonderful students learn more and to welcoming lots of new faces to codebar Oxford!
We’re currently looking for sponsors for our 2017 workshops. If you are reading this and are interested in becoming one of these sponsors, send us an email at oxford@codebar.io. We’d love to hear from you.
