“From a young age, I always learned to look at the situation that you’re in and consider what a faster, more innovative approach is.” This mindset has guided Fereshteh Forough on a pretty remarkable path, launching Code to Inspire, the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan. While a deep passion for rebuilding Afghanistan drives Fereshteh, she was born in a refugee camp in Iran. Her parents were forced to leave Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in the early 1980s, and the first time she stepped foot in her home
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
I recently attended a coding workshop hosted by the wonderful Node Girls in London where I was asked to give a talk about my journey into the technology industry. I gave a fairly honest and humorous (or so I’m told!) account of how I started learning to code, things I struggled with and a few tips and tricks that worked for me. After I got over my I-didn’t-do-Computer-Science-at-uni-so-I-will-never-become-a-developer phase, I finally took the plunge and started learning how to programme. This was almost a year ago and overall this experience has been
I decided to write a blog post on 4 things I have learned in my 7 months as a junior data engineer to document my learning and in the attempt to help others. These points are in no particular order and can be applied across engineering roles. When you have an idea, build it! There was a time when I raised my idea for a project, then waited for validation before I built it. I was told my idea was okay, and it remained in the backlog of tickets to do
I’ve been working on the CodeNewbie Challenge (aka #CNC2018) for months. It’s a project to help coders do one of four things: start coding, code more, blog more, or get a job. You pick a challenge, and over the course of 5, 7, or 9 weeks, you get a weekly mission with reading, research, and a homework assignment to help you reach your goal. It’s based on powerful questions, guided research, and curated resources to help point you in the right direction. You can learn more and sign up here
What does it take to be a really good web developer? If you’re working at your first programming job, you probably found out quickly that it’s not easy. It’s one thing to watch coding tutorials, read programming books, and make portfolio sites. It’s quite another to have to build websites from the spec, to meet deadlines, and most importantly, to make sure that your bosses and clients are happy! On top of all that, technology changes fast. You may feel like you have to stay on top of trends or risk
A few months ago, I received an email that often appears in my inbox. Its usually along the lines of “I’m a college student very interested in getting into tech, but I don’t study computer science, what do I do?”. I don’t consider myself the vanguard of all the necessary knowledge to answer such questions, but I do my best to answer based on my limited experience. Such is the frequency of these emails; I thought it would be smart just to make it into a blog post. That way I can
I am a 22-year-old woman in tech currently working as a Junior Data Engineer. Two months ago, I worked in a customer service role, and I was very fortunate to be offered this role as a secondment. I am now almost halfway through my secondment, working with a great team of people. I am learning about programming in Python and SQL and solving problems within Big Data. My life was completely different three months ago, and I am here to share my story with you. My background Just three months
I never grew up ‘technical’. I remember an exasperated friend having to explain the concept of MSN instant messenger [I feel old] to me around the mid-00s. Long story short, I didn’t have a clue. Computers were something I used like everyone but barely understood. I just wasn’t that ‘computer guy’ growing up. So how was it that I’ve ended up as a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup, then as lead developer/founder at POCIT? It all started with an idea for a website I had back during my
