Resources for Women Aspiring to Become Developers
RevUnit’s Bentonville office recently welcomed a group of young women to learn more about careers in technology through a Girls Who Code program offsite. Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization working to increase the number of women working in computer science.
The aspiring technologists spent several hours at RevUnit, learning about our work and culture, getting an office tour from RevUnit’s co-founders, and participating in a hands-on Work Better workshop to ideate ways to improve the program. There was also a panel discussion during which the young women could ask questions of veteran RevUnit product development experts about their careers and day-to-day work.
It was truly a pleasure to host the groups, as it is always inspiring to see more women feeling empowered to pursue careers in tech. Since we know that getting started in tech can be intimidating, we wanted to share some resources that beginning developers can leverage to hit the ground running:
- Organizations like Girls Who Code are a great way to get started in an environment where you have support. https://girlswhocode.com
- If you're looking to continue from there or get started on your own with a classroom feel, edX has a variety of free classes on fundamental front-end skills. https://www.edx.org/course/html5-and-css-fundamentals-2
- If you prefer to start out with a good read, there are free ebooks such as Automate the Boring Stuff that can help offer useful information for new developers. https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
- When you want to start implementing your own ideas or experiment with tweaking what others have done, Code Sandbox is a great environment with lots of example projects and a clean interface for seeing your code and what it does at the same time. https://codesandbox.io/
- Everyone gets stuck sometimes with code that just won't work when it seems like it should, but odds are a lot of people have run into the same problem before. Sites like Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/ or smaller communities like r/CodingHelp https://www.reddit.com/r/CodingHelp/ allow you to ask questions or more often find where someone else has asked the same question before.
- Ted Talks can also offer a mix of inspirational and useful messages. RevUnit’s Rebecca Black shared a few of her favorites with the Girls Who Code cohorts, including one by Debbie Sterling https://youtu.be/FEeTLopLkEo and Reshma Saujani https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC9da6eqaqg, the founder of Girls Who Code.
- Some organizations, including RevUnit, offer scholarships and internships to aspiring women developers -- it’s always good to reach out to technology organizations you respect to see what programs that might have available.
Getting started as a new developer may seem daunting at first, but you’d be surprised how many great resources are available and how helpful the developer community can be — in Northwest Arkansas and beyond!
