Volunteering has been something I’ve been doing since I was in high school. I volunteered in spaces that truly resonated with me, my passions, and personal mission. I am a proud volunteer for Girl Develop It’s Boston Chapter, and I try to engage with the communities locally to provide opportunities to get more girls and women exposed to technology and the diverse array of career opportunities within it. Outside of my markup language skills in HTML5 & CSS3, my technical skills consist of Python and JavaScript (and both of their
In FIVE days, I’ll be graduating from UC Berkeley. I’ll have completed 16 consecutive years of grade school. Knowing what I know now, here is a breakdown of what I wished I had learned during that time. On average, students in California spend 6.24 hours in school and roughly 181 school days per year — that’s 1,086 hours of schooling per year. Multiply that by the 16 years of schooling, give or take a couple hours here and there. I’ve spent 17, 376 hours of my life in school. That’s
How do we find ourselves in a world where there are so many firsts to be had for women of color? There are so few doctors, engineers, filmmakers that reach the level of success and recognition that even some of our other sisters seem to receive. On my level, there are VERY few, in fact, let’s say there ten sisters of color on college campuses leading a vocal and influential charge. Not because they don’t have a voice but because they are overlooked when someone asks, who should lead the
In the first installment of this series, we talked about strategies for learning to code when you’re starting out. Now we’ll move on to a topic that has been the source of blood, sweat, tears, and flipped tables for many a developer… Debugging, also known as the “why the $#!%* isn’t this working?” phenomenon. Stuck on a Coding Problem? It’s impossible to describe just how demoralizing it can be to try and fail at bug fixing. If you haven’t yet, at some point, you will feel like a prize idiot despite
Coding is damn hard. When you’re just starting out, coding is hard as hell. There’s just a lot of stuff to learn in web development. Front-end or back-end? React, Angular, Ruby, .NET? AJAX, JSON, SQL, MySQL, noSQL?? You may feel at times that you’re drowning in technobabble. Thanks Data, that helps a lot. The good news is, you can get good at coding. The bad news is, you are not going to master it in 12 weeks. Sorry if you’ve been told otherwise. Now, you can certainly pick up some of the
A lot of founders and VCs give advice to startup founders after they’ve become millionaires and notched some wins, which certainly produces some helpful tips but also loads of success bias. On the other hand, some of the best advice I’ve gotten is from fellow entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of their startups, just like me. I can’t consider myself successful yet, but I can say I have some experiences worth sharing with other entrepreneurs. One of the most frequent things I get asked is “how did you raise the
Alexandria Prather is Director of Strategic Partnerships and the latest member of the senior staff at All Star Code. What’s your background? I’m originally from Indianapolis. I did undergrad at Indiana University (go Hoosiers!) where I majored in International Studies & Spanish, and then American University in Washington DC, where I earned a Masters in Public Policy. When I was in DC doing my Masters, I interned at the White House and worked in Leader Nancy Pelosi’s and Representative André Carson’s office. I also worked at The Brookings Institution, a
Five years ago I was leading strategic partnerships for a World Bank agricultural research institution. I was “living my best life”, travelling all over the world and making an “impact” — at least that’s what I thought until I found myself on a rooftop in Nairobi, Kenya with a filmmaker, a designer, and a restaurateur who would change my life forever. That night, inspired by the courage, drive, and resilience of my peers I realized that disrupting the narrative on Africa in a way that did not involve “selling poverty”
Meet Tsion Behailu, a Google Software Engineer in the San Francisco Bay area. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelors in Computer Engineering. Tsion is not only a diligent and driven person, she also has a heart of gold. She is dedicated to helping others reach their highest potential. I’m lucky enough to have her as my cousin and mentor. When she’s not out conquering the world, she travels, spends quality time with family and friends, and inspires others to pursue computer science. Tsion was born in Metehara, Ethiopia and came to Atlanta, Georgia with
For the first time ever, someone besides my father gave me money do something. It was not just anyone either, it was the CEO of Y-Combinator Michael Seibel. The money is being used towards empowering Black Entrepreneurs in a monthly group I am organizing, but his contribution represents something fundamentally important that is hard to obtain — empowerment. Starting a successful venture is a complex undertaking that requires more than just the idea, but a good team, a strong network, strategy, capital and other important attributes. Black Entrepreneurs face a greater challenge
