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September 22, 2017 • Community, Tech

5 Reasons you should learn to code
with Code First: Girls

Today I’m collaborating with newly-recruited fellow Code First: Girls Ambassador Lakshika to showcase how awesome Code First: Girls a coding community course is!

Just in case you don’t know, Code First: Girls is a not-for-profit organisation that works hard to get more women into tech and entrepreneurship. I’ve been volunteering in helping out with the organisation and delivery of the courses here in Sheffield for the last two years! You can read my other posts about CF:G here.

Code First: Girls Spring 2017

An intro by Lakshika Awesome (yes, that’s her real name)

This year I have been given the opportunity to be a part of the CF:G. Wonder squad as a Student Ambassador. I shall be partnering up with the wonderful Pauline as her apprentice to help deliver a productive CF:G experience to the onboarding team.

My CF:G history began in February 2017 when I was given a chance to learn Advanced Programming in Python. My CF:G voyage comprised of the extremely proactive student ambassadors Pauline and Sophia, Sensei Tania and Sensei Darren, 30 beautiful wonder women all from diverse principals of study and an enlightening coding experience.

As a result I’ve become a more confident programmer.

And to continue being a part of this coding family, I decided to become the Robin to Pauline’s Batman and continue ameliorating my skills throughout this year.

Welcoming Lakshika!

1) 👩🏻‍💻 You are exposed to up-to-date programming tools and gain in-demand coding knowledge

Prior to learning Python programming with CF:G, I have had a good enough experience programming with C and C++. The unfortunate part is, I had no idea about tools such as GitHub, Heroku etc.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “If I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 4 hours sharpening my axe.” All of us wish to be good programmers but it’s in the way that we use the resources available to us is what seals the deal.

Tania and Darren were instrumental in teaching me good coding practices which I had failed to learn throughout my 2 years of coding experience.

– Lakshika

2) 👯 A diverse learning experience

All the women who were learning to code alongside me resulted in being my muses.

The sole reason, their epic minds generated epic ideas resulting in epic end course projects ranging from developing an app that could generate recipes out of the leftover ingredients in your pantry to using the data generated in twitter to list out similar trends.

I ended up making a game but the diversity in the projects influenced me in my future endeavours.

– Lakshika

3) 🌠 All our instructors have had a taste of fame

… from the Code First: Girls monthly newsletter. 😆

All the wonderful instructors who have taken the effort to deliver these sessions from their free time and deliver them well have all been nominated as the instructor of the month!

🔎 Click image for a closer look!

Talk about incredibly talented, dedicated (just like those Git commits) and overall dream team, right?

They’re also fun to work with and funny. Sometimes.

No, Darren, I’m not getting over this.

…also we have some rockin’ alumni:

– Pauline

4) 🍕 We recharge our brains over pizza

You’ll get fed pizza (the best way to recharge!) at our social where you can continue talking about everything you’re learning in the course and get to know the other girls from each course.

Sometimes we have quizzes (questions ranging from coding to movies to Taylor Swift trivia) and you can earn prizes (i.e. mostly the chocolate I need to stay away from)

CFG AW pizza social!

– Pauline

5) ⚡ You become part of a bigger community

In addition to being part of the wonderful Code First: Girls community, we invite special guests from the hackathon scene and wider women in tech community to talk to you about how valuable the skills you get from the course are, what you can do with it in terms of providing value in future careers and/or events like hackathons.

Some examples of guests we’ve had in the past include:

Kisha Bradley

Working with some of these amazing people, we have organised group trips to conferences and events. For example, last year we went to Nottingham and Leeds for women in tech events!

Empowering Women with Tech, Leeds
Women in Tech conference with HackSheffield

We even took some to their first hackathon with MedTech Sheffield!

– Pauline

Sound awesome? Join in!

Coding is such a valuable skill to have especially in this highly evolving society – get involved and sharpen up your skills but also connect with the amazing people in this community!

Code First: Girls at The University of Sheffield is back again running for the third year in a row! Applications are now open:

HTML/CSS: Applications close on 10th October https://codefirstgirls.typeform.com/to/xiWT9H
Python: Applications close on 4th October https://codefirstgirls.typeform.com/to/KgePnI

We hope to see you there! Don’t forget to share your excitement with us at #shefcodefirst.

Not in Sheffield? Don’t worry!

CF:G also runs across the UK – have a look to see if your University is listed here.

Or alternatively…

If you can’t attend these courses, you can always teach yourself. There’s plenty of resources online where you can get started…

Check out a full list of resources here.

PN in Greek

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