Ladies Who Code Conference

I recently attended the Ladies Who Code conference in London.

Ladies Who Code was set up by Angie Maguire and Shoshi Roberts in 2011 as a series of meetups for female developers, the aim being to create spaces for developers to meet up, hack, and be able to talk about issues facing women in the tech community.

Soon enough, the meetups grew large enough to justify their very own conference, the first of which was held in New York in 2012. There are now five chapters in the US and the UK, encouraging local communities of developers to meet up and talk code over coffee.

At the conference, there were free cakes and coffee available - perfect for devs.

The first session of the day was by Dr Sepideh Chakaveh from the University of Southampton. She talked about the SoFWIReD initiative in collaboration with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany, where MP3 technology was developed, and her colleagues include Tim Berners-Lee.

Sepideh's talk mostly centred around open data and dynamic data objects. She explained that research has shown that once an object has been shared, it changes, and thus cannot be controlled by any commercial interests. She was obviously passionate about this subject, so it was a good first talk of the day!

The second session was from Belén Albeza, currently a developer at Telefónica, and formerly at Facebook.

Belén took us through an excellent explanation of Grunt and why we should all use it. It got me thinking about how companies like mine, Deeson Online, could make front-end processes more efficient. For example, it would be great to run our front-end code through a few automated checks, compile from SASS, minify, and then test and commit these whenever we feel ready. There are several contributed plugins for Grunt, which do pretty much everything you want to do – all automated! Brilliant.

Next up was Desi McAdam from thoughtbot, where she is the Managing Director of their Denver office. She also runs devchix, a mailing list for female developers.

Desi gave a talk on how to get a job, explaining the usual hiring processes, suggesting interviewees not to get forced into a common 'whiteboarding' exercise if they don’t feel comfortable with it – she prefers a day of pair programming. She shared an anecdote where she turned down an interview where whiteboarding was part of the process – they called her back in for pairing!

.@desi dropped the POWER POSE at #ladieswhocode (@ted_talk on the subject: http://t.co/YGz900l6Ar). pic.twitter.com/d81jRj2gqd

— Chris Waring (@cwaring) October 26, 2013

After lunch, there were several lightning talks from attendees who had bravely signed up that day. These covered diverse subjects such as fanfiction, video editing, meetups, and designers making their first commits. I learned lots – and it was great to talk to a few of these ladies at the after party to find out more.

Yodit Stanton talked to us about her project, OpenSensors.io, a project that relies on cheap devices such as an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to collect data from their surroundings.

There are already some available sets of data from London councils, detailing things like parking tickets, anti-social behaviour and graffiti. These data sets allow hackathon participants to develop on top of the data. An example of this is a game based on anti-social behaviour in London. Unfortunately, it’s still really difficult to get open data, and this was a particular pain point for the project, as the data had to go through several organisations before it was allowed for release.

Sally Jenkinson then talked to us about mini-hacks. See her awesome slides here.

I was really inspired by her session – she advocated using the spare time we have in the day to learn and play more with technology, to get that child-like passion for learning back.

Something she mentioned really resonated with me, in that she is a perfectionist and wants to take a lot of time to really understand the subject she's interested in. However, most of us, due to a combination of work, home, and family life rarely have enough time to be able to do this, so it’s better to split the things you want to learn into smaller bits.

In fact, she motivated me so much that since my return from the conference, I’ve been taking 30 minute time slots each day to learn Ruby.

The final session of the conference was from Marianne Bellotti, CTO of Exversion, entitled 'I’m CTO, bitch!', about her experiences as a female CTO and within the hackathon community. She explained how to get recognised by potential investors, and how to present great ideas to hackathon judges.

I had a fantastic day at Ladies Who Code – I thoroughly recommend going along to one of the meetups. Everyone I met was extremely friendly, knowledgeable and inspirational. I felt really encouraged by the number of students there; hopefully they came away as inspired as I was.

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