What is it like to attend a Code2Change (C2C) Bootcamp (2018 edition)?
A Community of Women for Women
Change comes in increments but also as a tingling in your stomach. I have never attended any bootcamp before and I was excited that I was a full hour early on the first day! The C2C bootcamp consists of two days of CSS/HTML crash course and a final conference day to close the workshop. Short and sweet taste of life in tech. I joined the beginners level but there was an advanced programme for those with background. I will discuss only the beginners level, but for the advanced folks, they worked on extracting the API of Spotify. Swell project with Andreea Marin!
Freebie or Paid Commitment. While the C2C program is from non-profit Chunri Choupal, there is a financial contribution by attendees. The fee of 75 euros pays for lunch, snacks, and the lightning talk conference for the final day. Not cheap. That said, the organization also subsidizes participants on a need-to basis with a simple request. I believe that paying a little for a service signals commitment. This is the age-old debate in MOOCs and whether freebies provide less incentive to complete a session.
Venue. This year, C2C was held in Rent24 a co-working space in Amsterdam. They are one of the many partners of the initiative and opened their space for the workshop.
Safe Community. This is the key feature of C2C. It is a safe place to learn for women. You will see, meet, and talk with women in the same situation as you. You will interact with role models. Most of all, you are not judged on your educational background or age. I cannot emphasize enough that as a woman myself, it has not occurred to me how important it is to SEE other supportive women in the tech industry. Role models matter, honey. I want to emphasize that the best thing is that the programme focuses on middle age to older women in transition. We had participants coming out of a life-long medical illness and returning to employment. Someone in their 50’s who were programming in the 80’s and catching up. Women in other fields (including a neuroscientist) and planning to shift to tech. Women who have been busy with raising their children and now wanting to work. Also, we had women from disadvantaged backgrounds and finding their own confidence. But we also have regular folks, like a young college student in the arts. This is you and each one of us. This is why joining a bootcamp is simply solidarity in action and spirit.
Curriculum. Changing Mindsets. When you start from nothing, everything is possible. You can get lost and confused. Start on a program like I did with datacamp and still be confused. What I had missed was the fundamental feature of moving into tech — changing my mindset. I am talking about thinking logically, reasoning like a machine, structuring step by step commands, and communicating it clearly and succinctly.
I had just described how a machine receives information from humans. Us.
This jump is not typical everyday thinking because we as humans learn intuitly and compress physiological and mental knowledge. Like when you are learning how to cook, no cookbook needs to describe that your hand needs to ‘be 90 degrees and move up and down vigorously,’ it’s just ‘chop the onions!’ Unfortunately, we need to be pedantic with a machine.
Here lies the magic of CSS and HTML. With so many free website generating sites like Strikingly and Wix, creating a website doesn’t seem too necessary from my point of view. What I forgot was that CSS/HTML teaches you to switch your mindset and learn a simple language to communicate with a machine. The bonus part is that you have a visual outcome of your efforts. It was what I was missing when I first signed up for datacamp and jumped in the deep pool without water! It just clicked.
For the two day course, Alexandra Vargas was our brilliant facilitator who guided us through the starting line, writing our first lines of CSS, and then watching some of us pick up speed, help the slower ones, and advance our projects. Each one of us were encouraged to pair up or work on our own website projects for these two days. Specific and seemingly attainable! Think of it as condensed basic freecodecamp step-by-step guide. Somehow, it made us first time achievers in so short a time. It works!
Curriculum. Locating yourself in tech. One of the most crucial points in the bootcamp for me is to learn the field of the tech industry. It is huge, large, vague, and you can get lost in them. If you ask an ordinary bloke, what is I.T., you can’t really get a straight answer. It is nebulous but also everything that pops in your mind right now. This is the most valuable point in the first day. I’m sharing with you the slide of Alex that brings home our first day to think about our lives:
Where do you want to be in this universe of tech? Can you be one or all of these? Are you front-end or back-end developer? Which one of these are you interested in? These are heavy questions for the first day, but essentially what Alex was asking us was — who are you and what do you want to become? The most basic is really a challenge to know yourself deeply and recognize your interests after all the years of saying yeses and just going with the flow. Now you are given that choice to go where you want.
We had guest visitors who came to give us pep talks and my favorite is Ms. Valerie Vu Trang Chu from Adidas. An alumna of the program, she is an older woman caught up in two or three job redundancies and having kids to support. She now fashioned herself as the leading marketing analyst for Adidas’ online business. She says, her key pitch in getting hired was her years of experience as a business strategist and of course, her data storytelling. Truly inspiring!
Thanks to the dedication of the team helping us produce our first websites, lines of code, and spark to continue. We had teams that wanted to promote fitness while coding, a journal of the programme, decluttering (a project I am still working on now), among others.
A bootcamp is a space to jumpstart your creativity, find your community, reconnect with your self, and build confidence. Join one now!
(Next is the lightning talk, closing day!)
