I signed up for a coding class. Yes, as in computer coding and yes, what was I thinking.
I have been thinking of taking a coding class for a long time now, as I know nothing about coding and I want to know more. Well, I did take a summer computer class back in the early 80s (and mostly played Oregon Trail) where we wrote bits of code on our DOS screens to do things like print your name on that old timey computer paper. Oh we ooh and ahh’ed and then save things to our old timey 8 inch floppy disks. The good old days!
Coding, if you were unaware, has been receiving a lot of attention lately due to the lack of women coders, women in the field, and the rise of coding as a job requirement. Yes, coding as a job requirement. The Wall Street Journal recently had a opinion piece where the author Kirk McDonald wrote: “I’ve got to be honest about some unfortunate news: I’m probably not going to hire you…In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities… If you want to survive in this economy, you’d be well-advised to learn how to speak computer code. …Unless you understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, unless you’re familiar enough with the principles and machinations of coding to know how the back end of the business works, any answer you give is a guess and therefore probably wrong. Even if your dream job is in marketing or sales or another department seemingly unrelated to programming, I’m not going to hire you unless you can at least understand the basic way my company works. And I’m not alone” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323744604578470900844821388.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet).
So I found a two week online class for women! Yes, a coding class only for women. The class is from Codagogy http://codagogy.com/ and runs for 2 weeks for $50.00, which was created by Web Start Women (http://webstartwomen.com). They also have a bunch of other classes that you can take after the first one on HTML. The HTML class description reads: “This is the ground floor of website building! HTML is the underlying structure of all websites; from an indie coffee shop’s simple website to full-fledged applications like Amazon.com – pop the hood and beneath you’ll find HTML. In this course we’ll cover everything you’ll need to get your first webpage built and published – from software and tags to servers and domains” (https://codagogy.com/enroll/html). Wish me luck!
