100 words 093

There are many web-related community events in Brighton. There’s something going on pretty much every evening. One of my favourite events is Codebar. It happens every Tuesday, rotating venues between various agency offices. Tonight it was Clearleft’s turn again.

At the start of the evening, students and teachers get paired up. I was helping some people with HTML and CSS as they worked their way through the tutorials.

It’s a great feeling to watch things “click”; seeing someone making their first web page, style their first element, and write their first hyperlink—the very essence of the World Wide Web.

‘It’s a caring environment’: how codebar is building a diverse tech community | New faces of tech | The Guardian

A profile of Codebar Brighton, with words of wisdom from Alice and Cassie.

CSS and SVG animation workshop by codebarbrighton

There were two days of Codebar workshopping on the weekend as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. Cassie talked people through this terrific CSS animation tutorial, making this nifty Brighton-based piece.  

1 month in to my first developer role – Zara – Medium

I love seeing people go from Codebar to full-time dev work. It’s no surprise in Zara’s case—she’s an excellent front-end developer.

Career-change coder: how Siri got into programming - with the help of codebar - The Unit

Before leaving Brighton to head back to Sweden, Siri describes how Codebar helped her get started with front-end development:

I went along every week to work on my site, and was overwhelmed by the support and dedication of the mentors. Seeing the talented and diverse programmers in action made me re-think my preconceptions, and I soon realised that anyone can learn to code, from a 68-year-old retired teacher, to a twenty-seven-year-old female career-changer like me.

Less Bro-gramming: Net Natives host and sponsor Codebar | Net Natives

An excellent potted history from Cassie on women in computing.

NASA’s “Keypunch girls” would work in cramped rows translating programming instructions onto paper pads, whilst the machine operators would sit in comfort, feeding the code decks through card readers and enjoying the esteem of the end result (I imagine it a bit like Mad Men, but with more sexism and astronauts).