Podcasts about hackbright

Welcome to a brand new episode of the ¿Quién Tú Eres? podcast, where we explore the conflict we often face between "professionalism" & being our authentic selves. This week, we have the pleasure of speaking with Joshua Encarnacion. Joshua is a 1.5 generation Dominican-American, and a proud Afro-Latino…with his heart set on growing and helping people grow into their full potential. He's helped build 3 tech-industry startups and worked in training & recruiting roles for big tech companies Uber & Google. Born in Manhattan, NY, and raised in Lawrence & Springfield, MA, Joshua has nothing but love for his folks and the people he's met along his journey as a lifelong learner consisting of a lot of sports, math, reading, perreo, bachata, y cafe bustelo. Throughout his career, he's serviced the following organizations: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, UBER, Airbnb, Netflix, Pandora, Slack, Twitter, Pinterest, Earnest, Gusto, Affirm, Abstract, Simply Business, Thumbtack, Yelp, Asana, Lyft, Atlassian, Tinder, First Round Capital, Kapor Center, General Assembly, Hackbright, Latinas in Tech, NextPlay, CODE2040, Hack The Hood, CODE Tenderloin, The Justice Collective, Change Catalyst, Techqueria, Big Nerd Ranch, and MANY more unlisted. He's coached people through various challenges by helping them grow the emotional intelligence and high-performance habits necessary to create their own professional success, which is a passion of his. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/quientueres/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/quientueres/support

Chloe Condon is a Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft and graduated from Hackbright in 2017. She got pushed into tech by accident but has now helped to touch so many lives. Hear her story and lessons in this fun episode. 8:08 How a random talk pushed her into tech 18:20 Why diversity of opinions matter in building products 21:20 Authenticity helped make her Twitter famous 31:53 Applying bootcamp learning to multiple things 34:31 The lows (& highs) of searching for her first job 41:40 Don't settle when choosing your first job 44:34 What does a Developer Advocate do every day? 47:42 How streaming has democratized information sharing Follow Chloe on Twitter (@ChloeCondon) to stay updated on all the stuff she does for untraditional techies. PLEASE RATE the episode and SUBSCRIBE if you learned something new! ------------------ Follow us on LinkedIn for all our events & tips: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/booting-up Or Twitter works too: https://twitter.com/BootingUpPod Join our community of bootcamp grads on Discord at: https://prentus.co/community

This week we're kibbitzing with actor-turned-coder and all-around tech champion Chloe Condon! We talk about how we're passing the time under quarantine, the dirty secret about working as a creative pro (there's rarely any money in it!), transitioning from theater to tech, and Chloe's efforts to inspire the next generation of STEM workers! Chloe also weighs in on recent QOTD posts, and Matt apologizes on behalf of all cis straight dudes because as a rule, we're the worst. Shape up, fellas!

Chris Castle sits down with Shirley Xu, who went through a coding bootcamp, and Eric Chen, who is a recent graduate, to talk about their journey into their first programming jobs at Heroku. For both of them, the experience of programming in a day-to-day role is vastly different than what they experienced at school; namely, rather than analyzing algorithms, they were exposed to Ruby, Rails, and entire groups of people involved in shipping features. They recognize that they went through a period experiencing imposter syndrome, before realizing that every developer, no matter their status, shares those same feelings. Certain soft skills were also acquired. Eric learned how to move past his fear of looking ignorant and just ask questions whenever he didn't know a term or a process. He felt that this made him into a better engineer and, besides which, no one had ever refused to explain a concept. Shirley discovered that in order for her to achieve her goals, she needed to express them clearly to her mentors and manager. For example, after she expressed that she would one day like to become a technical lead or manager, her mentor was better able to develop a long term plan of the concrete steps that Shirley would need to take to get there. Tech moves fast, and a portion of this episode is dedicated to how everyone keeps up with the latest trends and terms. All agree that the breadth of knowledge is simply too much to consume, and it's okay to not know everything. That doesn't make you a better or worse developer: it simply means your expertise lies elsewhere. The episode concludes with some advice for anyone not in software development, but is considering a change. Eric suggests keeping yourself motivated, with time blocks in your schedule dedicated to simply learning. Shirley provides a long list of resources, as well as a six-to-twelve month timeframe to go from a neophyte to your first job. Links from this episode Several coding bootcamps and online tutorials were mentioned as possible starting points for those interested in transitioning into a career in tech: HackBright CodeAcademy PluralSight L'Ecole No 41 freeCodeCamp

Today, Jessica and I chat about the path she took to become a Developer Advocate at Google. After studying Sociology and Education in college, Jessica dedicated herself to working for both Girls Inc. and Girl Scouts. After five years of doing that, she transitioned her focus onto mental health advocacy work. After facing some extremely difficult tragedies in that role and receiving encouragement from friends and family, she decided to take a class at her local college to learn C++ in hopes of transitioning yet again. That was the moment she fell in love with programming and the rest is history! She attended Hackbright Academy and even went on to teach there for a few years afterwards. Today, she is a Developer Advocate at Google, where she creates content in innovative ways to help other developers build with Google Assistant. We speak about the power of community and the importance of relationships in this industry. Jessica shares incredible advice on how to leverage those relationships while job hunting. She provides tips for those interested in exploring a role within Developer Relations and presents some tangible ideas to help recruiters find you. Jessica is an absolute rockstar and is ever so inspiring- this episode is not one to miss! Find Jessica online on Twitter & Instagram as ChataSweetie

Becca Rosenthal is a Middle East Studies major turned software engineer. After college, she spent a few years working at a Jewish non-profit in Jackson, MS. And when she moved back home to Oakland, she realized quickly that tech would be her ticket to stay in her beloved city. Thus, she decided to learn to code by attending Hackbright Academy. After graduation, she quickly landed an engineering job at Reddit. Today, Becca and I dive deep into how she did just that. A year into her tech career, she attributes her successes to her ability to slay at office karaoke, her intense curiosity, and her absolute refusal to eat a meal at her desk. Her day to day life at Reddit is filled with puns and banter and if you’re ever searching for someone to write or perform a nerdy song for your tech company, Becca is the person for the job! Our conversation ranges from silly topics such as what the lyrics to Reddit the Musical would be to the power of eliminating the word “Sorry” from your vocabulary. Becca is an absolute badass and this episode is packed with incredible advice and powerful ideas. It is not one to miss! Resources: - The Mentor Song. It's fictional. - An AMA Becca and two other Reddit engineers did about Hackbright and bootcamps in general - r/GirlsGoneWired - r/CSCareerQuestions- The resources that Becca gives to Hackbrighters at the end of the bootcamp. (It includes all of the problems she got in coding interviews, an amazing study guide, and the comically long post where she told us about everything she did from Hackbright to getting a job.)- Find Becca on Twitter @BeccaRoRo and on Reddit as u/SingShredCode.

Angie Chang is CEO and Founder at Girl Geek X (formerly Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners). Prior to Girl Geek X, she was VP of Strategic Partnerships at Hackbright Academy, a women's engineering school which has graduated over 500+ female software engineers. Hackbright was acquired by Capella Education Company in April 2016. Angie led partnerships with employers from February 2013 to February 2017 at Hackbright, where she built valuable hiring partnerships (Uber, Slack, GoDaddy, Redfin, Indiegogo and more), launched the mentorship program (enlisting 700+ industry engineers as volunteers in 4 years) and connected countless women to new jobs in tech. Prior to that, she co-founded Women 2.0 in 2006, a media company which promotes women in high-tech entrepreneurship, and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in 2008 (now Girl Geek X). She was named in Fast Company's 2010 "Most Influential Women in Technology"​ and more recently Business Insider named her one of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech"​. Angie has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak on women's high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship in the West Bank, Switzerland and Germany. In her early career, Angie held positions in product management and web/UI production at various Silicon Valley startups. She holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. Angie shares how she says yes to what life offers her and how it has helped her become the successful entrepreneur that she it today.  Check out her episode to listen to her story. Check out thetaoofselfconfidence.com for show notes of Angie's episode, Angie's website, resources, gifts and so much more.

Jessica Burns from the Amazon Kindle User Experience coding team visits the phone booth for like an hour and a half and Jonnie forgets to hit "record". Culture fit, all-nighter coding sessions, what's really ruining Seattle? Four-Finger Shotguns is a production of Zip! Bang! Wow! in Seattle. For more information abut this podcast, please visit our website at zipbangwow.com/ffs/ The voicemail system of a Russian bot factory isn't very user friendly. You can finally be rid of the dead weight of all that excess money you have. Please visit patreon.com/ffspodcast to unload your burden. So much show notes today: You'd learn a whole lot more about Jessica if you visited all these spots. AMuse-Me.co, Amazon.com/kindle, washingtontechnology.org, apprenticareers.org, pugetsoundpython.com, and fast.ai to name but a few. A few more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A Tombstone City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhwiCKzgGI Take the quiz. https://hackbrightacademy.com Zip! Bang! Wow! teaches you how to podcast, badly, at the Impact Hub Seattle. See impacthubseattle.com for more details. More information about the Symposium of Change on May 21st at chrisrosbough.com  

Ana Ulin discusses her path as a manager and the benefits of hiring people from coding bootcamps like Hackbright academy.

Kaylie Kwon: kaylieEB | kayliekwon@gmail.com Show Notes: 02:14 - Kaylie's Journey Into Software Development 09:25 - Implementing a Design System and Attacking Higher-level Workflows 15:43 - EDS Collaboration and Public Availability 19:07 - Getting Involved with The Yarn Project 20:57 - Selective Resolution 23:37 - The Warmth of the Yarn Community 27:11 - Handling Issue Communication and Tracking Resources: Eventbrite britecharts Eventbrite Spectrum Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast. My name is Charles Lowell, I'm a software developer here at the Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me today is Elrick Ryan. Hello Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's up Charles? CHARLES: Not much. Are you enjoying your morning so far? ELRICK: Yeah, my morning is going well. Everything is good. CHARLES: Lots of cups of coffee? ELRICK: No cups of coffee yet. I've been drinking a lot of green tea. CHARLES: I've actually heard that's really good for you. ELRICK: That's what I heard too. That's why I started drinking it. CHARLES: Did you continue because it tastes good or do you just live on the idea of how good it is for you? ELRICK: A little bit of both. It doesn't taste that great but it's not horrible. It's almost like an acquired taste and then when you add in, "This is good for me," then it tastes great. CHARLES: Okay. We got a nice [inaudible] there. ELRICK: Yes. CHARLES: Anyway, I guess we should, at some point get on to the main content of our podcast. We have a very interesting guest with us today who has her fingers in all kinds of pies that we were talking about just at the pre-show, just before we were recording so we're really, really happy to have Kaylie Kwon. Thank you for coming on the show and welcome. KAYLIE: Hi. Thank you for having me. CHARLES: It's going to be great. Now, you are a software engineer at Eventbrite, that's correct? KAYLIE: Yep. CHARLES: What kind of things do you do over there? KAYLIE: I used to work on part of the feature team that worked on their reserved seating product but not too long ago, I moved to our frontend platform team, which is a team that helps other frontend engineers move faster through things like working on infrastructure or Eventbrite design system and dev tools. CHARLES: So like getting into the tools that unlock the exponential productivity of the developer team? KAYLIE: Uhm-mm. CHARLES: We're going to dig into all of that because you just listed a bunch of really interesting stuff. I'm really excited to talk about the design systems, in particular but lots of different stuff. But before we do, I understand that you have a fairly unique way of entering in to the position that you're in now. Your journey didn't follow the traditional arc. Would you be willing to elaborate on that or tell us that story? KAYLIE: Yeah, totally. I graduated with a degree in art history, not related to computer science at all. Then right after, I moved to New York and worked for a small startup. It was marketing/business development role and I wasn't really happy with it. I was working on some design-y stuff on the side with HTML and CSS but I just felt like my brain just needed to be stimulated a little more. I applied to this all women's bootcamp program called Hackbright in San Francisco. It was a three-month intensive program and luckily coming out of that, I had at least some initial knowledge to get my foot in the door and Eventbrite was one of the hiring partners. They brought me in for interview. I actually had no idea that it was going to be a frontend engineering role because my bootcamp was totally in Python and it just had more with a backend focus. Ben, who spoke at React Boston Conference with me, was actually one of the interviewers and he gave me this Clojure problem and I solved it but in Python just using recursion. He was like, "You got it. Just convert it to JavaScript," and I was like, "No, it just can't be done. No JavaScript." But there's the reason he would chose to hire me and they onboarded me as an internal bootcamp within Eventbrite. The first three months I was there, I learned about React, Redux, JavaScript, ES6, all of that good stuff. Then they moved me to a feature team, where I continued, I guess working on the product and then I became involved more with open source projects. I really expressed interest in when you're a new engineer and coming onboard, there's all these assumed knowledge that isn't documented anywhere or something will be really obscure and hard to use but people will just assume that that's the status quo. This idea around developer experience and helping other developers move faster, it just kind of become a natural interest of mine. I was talking to the platform team, Ben in particular, expressed my interest in working in these areas. Just about like a month ago, we did a big re-org and I landed on the platform team. Currently, we have a lot of projects in flight. One of them being moving our dependency system from our old codebase, which first was written in RequireJS to webpack. We're building out our Eventbrite design system, which is basically a shared UI component library that other teams could leverage. Our platform team will just come in and make sure that the API is usable across different teams and maintain a consistent brand in terms of look and feel. We're also working on other tooling stuff like making sure we use Docker for our dev environment and making sure that the frontend containers don't break, making sure that everyone is on the same version of ESLint, Node and things like that. CHARLES: How do you make sure that the frontend containers don't break? KAYLIE: It's actually hard. I think one thing that we're trying to test right now is using Yarn Offline Mirror and having better caching. When you build a container, it'll look into the cache directory, which is just bunch of committed tarballs. That way, they don't have to fetch to the network each time because once the lockfile or package.JSON changes at our current state, it'll rebuild the entire container and it could take a very long time. We just have a lot of packages that we've added over time. Other things, we're experimenting along with our platform team on the backend side about having remote images. Instead of devs building their containers locally on their computer, having them remotely built by a CI system and then just pulling the container and the images down. CHARLES: Really, really you're like all over the place. That sounds so much fun. KAYLIE: Yeah, it's a lot of context switching. Sorry, if I was jumping too many topics at once. CHARLES: No, absolutely not. I think it's actually fascinating and it's actually capture the kind of scope because when you are doing development, if you yourself are not running up and down the stack, the tools that you use are. The better the tools, the better you're able to focus on the one little sliver of the stack that you're working on. If I don't have to worry about where are my Docker images are coming from or if there's a temporary network flip that I can't install my dependencies, if I don't have to worry about those things, then that makes me more effective so it's important to just kind of lay out all of the stuff that goes into making a quality developer experience. KAYLIE: Yeah, the dream is like frontend people wouldn't have to worry about any of the backend stuff and they just have this isolated environment, where they could just work on what they do best, which is JavaScript and writing features in React. Everything else just works and they could see that replicated through their dev environment as well as QA and Prod and hopefully, make every tooling that they use, like testing and linting all easily, intuitive and accessible. CHARLES: How is it that you're working up and down the stack, making sure that your CI systems, your Docker images but then also at the same time, working on a design system, which you've got collaboration, I assume with some pretty hard core devops teams but also then you're interfacing with designers. You kind of flesh out your design system. Are those the same people on the platform team? Or there are different groups within it? KAYLIE: We have designers and researchers actually, as part of our engineering unit. We work pretty closely with them to define guidelines on what the design system should look like because coming into making this designs system, one thing we really wanted to make sure that is that both sides of engineering and design have input, rather than the previous old version called Style Guide, which was more engineering-driven that not. One team would need a model so they would build a model and a different team would build a slightly different model and we would end up with five different models. They want to be maintained over time and there wasn't really a focus on accessibility or consistency of brand so the design system project was to eliminate all of those pain points. CHARLES: For people who may not be familiar with design system but it's something that certainly is cramping up more and more, what's the general strategy you take? Clearly, you talked about the kind of the pains that it solves, like I'm experiencing this pain where I've got five dialogues, I've got three ways of laying out forms, I've got these problems. What's the strategy that I go about as my organization for trying to implement this? Like now, I want to do a design system, where do I start? KAYLIE: One big thing, I think that helped us was developing Eventbrite design system as just the standalone product. You could run Eventbrite design system as a standalone with all of the documentation and components with each of their different props that could be configured and it has its own set of tests. All of the components are API-driven so there's nothing specific about business logic that it assumes. For example, our button component just assumes that I'll be receiving a type of submission and some [inaudible] body. It doesn't make any assumptions that it's going to be anything Eventbrite specific. It's high-level configurable that the end user wants it to be. Another thing that helped is we have a planned approach session right before we start working on a new component. A developer who would be building the component would meet with one of the frontend platform members and will be discussing the API of the component, the CSS that would go in it and the designer would do the final QA. The development takes longer than if you were to write just a component for your app but we're trying to build it out for a long term use. We have versioning for Eventbrite design system as a library so whenever you make updates, we added to the changelog and then it gets released and we bumped in Core, which is where all of our apps live and people have to get the new version. Basically, it's an orchestrated effort and we have a process built around scheduled releases and bumping it in Core. CHARLES: I get the wanting to have a uniform buttons, uniform labels, dialogs and things like that. How do you attack the problem of higher-level workflows like a form submission and validation process that might have a lot of different pathways? How do you guide that using a design system? KAYLIE: Those are actually really good questions because we went through issues like that. Validation form field or components that have logic around more complex inputs and validation is really hard because different teams use it in a slightly different way so we ended up having two versions of complex inputs. Now, we're in the process of deprecating the V1 and then having people move over to V2. We also use the Atomic Design Principles for Eventbrite design system. It means, things like atoms would be composed of buttons and we have molecules, which are slightly more complex. Then one level above that would be organisms, which are things like forms. Obviously, as you move up to like the higher level, it becomes more difficult for us to decide does this belong in EDS or does it belong with the app. There's lots of refactoring that sometimes ends up happening as a result of something built one way and us realizing later down the road that it wasn't actually very extensible and we just built it for this particular use case. Sometimes, it's the opposite where this was too generic. We can make it a little bit more specific and add more logic to it. It really depends on the component but that's been our strategy, just taking the components as needed. We're still in the earlier stages. We've released EDS a year ago and now, we're almost close to finishing it. We're just missing a handful of components. They'll be more [inaudible] that's available as opposed to adding a brand new component. CHARLES: Did you find guidance in existing design systems? One thing is why not just use one of the existing ones that's out there. Is it a matter of branding? Is it a matter of, "There are certain interactions which are unique to our product that we need to design system to capture them?" I guess my question is, if this is something I want to take on myself, what tools would I be able to reach for and what other design systems would I be able to look to versus what I have to contribute myself? What am I going to be looking for to share with the community and what am I going to look for that's develop that's uniquely mine? KAYLIE: I think consistency was a big issue. Sort of the genesis of idea came actually even before I joined the company but I think what they were going for was that we already had an existing component library called Style Guide and it wasn't really working out for us. To build like a common UI library was a natural assumption but making it better, making it more reusable. We looked at companies like Airbnb and Microsoft and I learned a lot from what they were doing. You definitely wanted some components that are specific to Eventbrite such as a ticket card or a media card that we use for our browse pages which would be needed for Eventbrite specific pages. I think mostly, the designers wanted more control because relying on third library means we don't always get what we want. We're actually thinking about making EDS open source at some point in the future, where it could take themes so other companies or individuals can leverage it but use their own theming scheme. If Spotify came and wanted to use EDS but using their colors and brand logo, then they could do so, just by layering a different configuration style to it. CHARLES: That's such an interesting idea. Is this something that you all have explored, maybe collaborating with another company? I'm trying to think what would be the benefit of making it publicly available, unless you would be getting lots of contributions back to improve EDS itself. Is that the idea? KAYLIE: Yeah. We're definitely set on making it public at some point in the future but making it open source is a different conversation because like you said, there's pros and cons that comes with open sourcing a package. We recently open source britecharts, which is a D3 library. It's been getting a lot of contributions. It's a good recruiting tool but it's also a lot of maintenance work outside of developers normal work hours. Also, we have to start worrying about like when we make a breaking change to a component, we're not just breaking it for our own product but for other developers. We currently have external developers. We have Eventbrite plugin system called Spectrum so developers are already building on top of that and they've been asking for something like this, where they could leverage and match the look and feel with the rest of the product. The downside is lots of maintenance hours and worrying about all the people that would be breaking the component for by just solving your use case. I feel like I didn't fully answer one of your questions, which was you have a different dynamic of people working on both really backend ops things, as well as a really frontend design system work. We definitely got very smart people on the team. Some people definitely have expertise in one area versus on others. Currently, we have five developers and some of us lean more towards the backend of the frontend work and I am one of those people working on things like Yarn and Docker and build system work but it's funny because I was thinking if I had a portfolio then, there wouldn't be any visual components to it, even though I'm a frontend developer. It would just be like terminal screens. We try to divide the work but everyone tries to, I guess develop, at least some shared knowledge around why we make the decisions that we do. CHARLES: It's interesting how they all intersect. I feel like the trend of the last 10 years has been to dev of all the things. I think the first thing was this artificial divide between developers and testing and that came together with the test driven development and test obsessed. Then there was this divide between developer and an ops and that divide went away now with the advent of the devops movement. Now, there's this divide between developers and design and I feel like that kind of wall is collapsing right now. You have developers participating a lot more in design and designers spending a lot more in development. We're seeing that but it's just funny how the devs starts integrating with all the things. KAYLIE: Yeah, that's a really good insight. CHARLES: You said you kind of naturally gravitate towards more of the backend doing the working with Docker, working with Yarn. How did you get actually involved with the Yarn Project? KAYLIE: Eventbrite converted over from NPM to Yarn maybe a year ago and the benefits that we got from converting over was awesome because we were manually editing NPM shrinkwrap, which is a nightmare and the installation speed of the container was really slow just because we were on NPM and it didn't really have any advance caching mechanisms at that point. Yarn just sped up a lot of things for us. I really like the user interface outside of just installing. You actually get a lot of freebie commands like 'yarn why,' that tells you why you have a particular dependency or you could do 'yarn check.' It was just a lot more helpful. I've been wanting to contribute to open source for a while so I did a little bit of work before then but the community was really encouraging when I first try to solve and pick up some first contribution bugs off of their backlog. At the time, they were pushing for 1.0 release so there's a lot of excitement about what Yarn will be and all the new features will be adding. I kept trying to pick places where I felt like I could be of help and then, Christoph, the manager of the Yarn Team and I believe [inaudible] team as well, reached out and asked if I wanted to build the selective resolution feature for them. I was like, "Yeah. I'll give it a go." Then I did it. CHARLES: What is selective resolution? KAYLIE: Good question -- CHARLES: Because I use Yarn every day and I've never heard this term. KAYLIE: It's something that became available with 1.0 release, much like workspaces and most of the time, you're not going to need it but sometimes, you're using a library. That library will have a nested dependency that for some reason, has a bug or you can't work with that package or maybe you just want to dedupe the package so that all of your dependencies end up using one version of that particular nested package. Selective resolution is like a way for you to override other libraries dependencies -- CHARLES: Oh, that's really cool. I like that because I've had that happens to me where I want some version of a library that has got a bug fix and yet, some other library that's depending is requiring this library and they're getting the old version and I'm like, "Nah!" ELRICK: That was happening to me last night. I wish I knew about this. CHARLES: Yes, seriously. KAYLIE: Yeah. Before this -- CHARLES: I'm glad we had you on justifying about this. KAYLIE: Awesome. Before this, you would have to file an issue with the original maintainer and maybe, it'll get fix. Maybe it won't or maybe you're stuck on the old version and you can't do anything about it. We had a really similar issue with the PhantomJS package, where we wanted to use a next patch version with a bug fix but then, something that was requiring it wasn't letting us use it. It works. I verified it. It seems like Facebook started using it as well so it was a pretty rewarding to work on that. CHARLES: That's exciting. I also plan on using it the next time I encounter this. ELRICK: To get this feature, is this a flag that you have to pass? How does it do the selective resolution? KAYLIE: As long as you're using Yarn 1.0 or above, you define resolutions field inside of your package.json, like how you would define that dependencies, you also have extra [inaudible] resolutions. On the left hand side, you put in a glob pattern that you want to match and if you want to match all packages, you just enter the name of the package. Then on the right side, you enter whatever version or path that you wanted to match. It could be a file or a GitHub link or it could be a version or a range or whatever you want. ELRICK: Nice. CHARLES: That's fantastic. Now, you mentioned that as you were coming to work on this, you were looking for features to work on but the community actually did a very good job of drawing you in and getting that contribution from you, which is actually pretty amazing when you think about it. I think a lot of open source projects, either flourished or failed by their ability to attract contributors. What was it that was particularly inviting? KAYLIE: It was a combination of things. I think one thing is they tried to point you to the actual code like if you want to submit a PR, then this is where you would get started. I actually started doing that myself on some of the issues. Everyone loves PRs more than issues so I think giving people filing the issues, some, I guess empowerment to try to fix it on their own, I think is great. They also have a Discord Channel for devs to talk about any questions that they might have, how to set up their initial dev environment, to test things on Yarn. Also, they were really nice. They were really thankful when I posted a PR or commented on the fix. They also use a lot of emojis, which helps. I think I personally found it really rewarding because it made me a better developer. Before contributing to Yarn, I didn't know that much about Node. For me, it was just fun to learn more about like, "This is how something else works," and also, the codebase uses a lot of different linting configurations, which I hadn't really used before so that was a nice learning curve there as well. ELRICK: For your initial time going to Yarn when you didn't know much about it, was the champion from the project that worked with you to get you over the hump or places that you were stuck or did you just have to kind of figured it out on your own or did you ask questions on the Discord Channel or in Slack Channel or anything? How did that process go initially? KAYLIE: I definitely pace myself. I just picked up easier bugs on a repos if possible and BYK and Mel who maintain the project would give guidance, especially through PR comments and they also answer any questions on issues. If I ask questions like what's the right approach here, because sometimes you get a bug and it's not just a bug. It actually has to do with philosophy of like, what should Yarn do in this case. There be like really minor edge cases like maybe NPM does that in a particular way, should Yarn respect that or should it try to be better? Those discussions are, I think really helpful and interesting and understanding what's going on. CHARLES: It's fantastic when the conversation just builds and you're learning stuff and then you actually feel like you came out with the best solution that was available to you at the end of the process. ELRICK: You gain a lot of context about the project during those conversations. CHARLES: Right. KAYLIE: Yeah, what was good about those selective resolution feature was it was completely community-driven, even from the RFC standpoint which submitted by someone in the community and then it was implemented by me, who doesn't work in Facebook. I think that's awesome. CHARLES: There's been a lot of thought that was put into the feature even before the implementation. That's always so critical to getting people's and giving them some specifications, some blueprint of what they're actually going to build. One of the things also that I wanted to touch on too is you mentioned before the show that they have a very unique take on the way they handle communication with the community, not just in terms of pull request but also in terms of issues. KAYLIE: Yarn issue count is around 800 -- CHARLES: Boy, that's a lot. I can feel daunting when you look at that, right? KAYLIE: Yeah, but it's actively [inaudible] project, a lot of people are passionate about it and there are bots that other projects use to just automatically close issues when they're not active. But something that BYK told me was when issues are closed, people take it somewhat personally and we just want to make sure that there's like a human touch to it and we, at least get to the issues without just automatically closing them. I really respect that. I think even when people are really frustrated, the maintainers never really lose their shit. They're always very graceful and when someone is acting outside of the standards of Code of Conduct, there's a gentle reminder. So far, all of the interactions that I've seen to the issues have been really constructive, rather than being like, "Sorry, we're not going to work on this." It feels like it is a community project and people care about how it's being used. It's actually not easy given all the different operating systems that Yarn has to accommodate. It's like a pretty low level tool so I give the guys a lot of kudos for handling that. CHARLES: Eight hundred issues means that with a human touch, that means 800 people have to actually respond to those issues and usually those 800 people are not actually 800 people. They're like 10 people or some number significantly below 800. How do you attack them to try and make sure that they're responded to in a timely fashion? KAYLIE: I think issue tracking is the hardest part of open source. I think it's in the order of issue tracking and then reviewing PRs and then submitting PRs because writing code is writing code but understanding other people's code is more difficult and understanding other people's issues and what the bug is, actually is even more difficult. You don't, obviously have their exact dev environment so sometimes, it's hard to repro. I think we do a lot of things that a lot of other projects leverage, which is we label the issues, we define priority if it's actually impacting a lot of people or if it's a critical bug like you can install a package versus maybe a warning message that could be tweet. Then we kept a board, like a GitHub board to track issues when we were heading for the 1.0 release. I'm not sure if we're still doing that but that helped to a degree. Other people from the community, not just the maintainers, jump in to try and help out an issue, which is probably one of the best things. Then when we merge pull requests, we close the issues that have been referenced. CHARLES: Yeah, it's really wonderful when that thing happens. I'm so curious like how to [inaudible] because I know that it's so disheartening when you're working on a project and you file an issue and maybe, it doesn't even go answered for one day, two days or two weeks or you submit a pull request and no one's even commenting on it. It can be really disheartening and kind of make you question the viability of the product itself, especially if you see a lot of activity elsewhere. On the one hand, I also understand that the maintainers are human and they probably have a lot of obligations. I know that I've got a lot of projects where I let the issues languish and I even have one that I'm using where I can't get any response and it's just so frustrating. KAYLIE: Yeah, even Yarn is definitely not perfect. There are definitely issues that sort of go buried. You could add us at YarnPackage/Core. That pings all of us and the core team. You could call out specific people but that's a tough one. CHARLES: This isn't with Yarn, by the way. It's a totally separate project. It's fantastic when there's that basic acknowledgement. It makes such a difference in people's perception of the entire enterprise. Looks like we're actually approaching time. If we want to give a special shout out to any talks you're going to be giving, any events that you'll be at or -- KAYLIE: Actually, Ben on my frontend platform team is speaking at Nodevember about Next React. I think that's where the shout out. And then Christoph will be speaking at AgentConf in Austria, I think in January about the future of dev tools. I think both things are [inaudible]. CHARLES: All right. Fantastic. ELRICK: Any slick future features coming out in Yarn that we should know about? KAYLIE: I'll keep you updated. CHARLES: She's sworn to secrecy. KAYLIE: Yeah. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to [inaudible] yet. CHARLES: I could hear the pause of conspiracy in your voice. Thank you so much, Kaylie for coming on the show. This has been a really wonderful conversation that's just gone all over the map and those are my favorite kind. Thank you very much. KAYLIE: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun, guys. CHARLES: Well, if people want to get in touch with you, how would they go about doing that? KAYLIE: I'm a rarity, where I don't have Twitter. You can email me, I guess. CHARLES: File an issue on Yarn. KAYLIE: Yeah. I'm KaylieEB on GitHub and KaylieKwon@Gmail. CHARLES: As always, you can get in touch with us. We're at @TheFrontside on Twitter or just drop us a line on the email. You use that on occasion too at Contact@Frontside.io. Thank you, Kaylie. Thank you, Elrick and thank you for listening.

Dr. Carol Langlois is a lifelong educator who used to run the business program at USF. She was the Dean at Mills College and founder of Higher Education Specialists. She did a dissertation in female self-esteem development that led her to creating a book called Girl Talk where she interviewed over 200 high school women on the subject. It was later turned into a play called Girl Talk: Teen Monologue Series. It's next performance is going to be on August 24 @ Potrero Stage in SF.

There are a lot of people who want to change their career later in life. They want to do more challenging work, earn more money, and have a better lifestyle. Given the growing need of technical talent in the US, it would see like a technical career would be a great choice, right? Unfortunately despite the dearth of technical talent, many people are wary because of the misconception that transitioning into a technical career later in life is just too hard. Another is, as you start to fall behind on your technical skills, it’s hard to play catch up! Hence, a lot of people struggle to stay relevant. Piling on career pauses like parenthood make it even harder! However, the growing number of retraining programs, bootcamps, and online education options are looking to cater to busy people who are eager to transition into a technical position. In today’s episode we’ll talk to Tina Lee, who is actively is working to change these misconceptions with her nonprofit MotherCoders, which helps moms on-ramp to technical careers in the new economy. You’ll learn from Tina: Why people get put on the mommy track and how it does a disservice to women who want to continue to pursue their careers Why technical skills are crucial for employment and why Tina is focused on helping mothers acquire them Why companies shouldn’t withhold investing in a retraining program and how it can benefit employees and employers attract and retain top technical talent Show Notes Check out MotherCoders at http://www.mothercoders.org/  FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).   Full Transcript Poornima:         Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer. In this show, I host innovators in tech and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies. One common misconception I come across a lot is how challenging it can be to pursue a technical career midway through your career.             Another is that it's really hard once you've lost track of your technical skills, or they've gotten rusty, to get back on track. One woman, Tina Lee, is working to change this misconception. She is the founder of MotherCoders, a nonprofit, that helps moms on ramp to technical careers in the new economy. Thanks for joining us, Tina. Tina Lee:            Thanks for having me. Poornima:         Yeah. So, I know you and I met about a year ago at a conference, but I'm not too familiar with your background. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about how you got started. Tina Lee:            So, I started this journey towards having a technical career when I became a management consultant coming out of college. I helped implement large, enterprise-level IT systems and from there I kind of had this epiphany that tech was going to play a major role in business, and it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world was going to be transformed by it as well, and then after that I did technical recruiting. I spent some time in grad school studying education technology, and then ended up working on behalf of nonprofits and government and helping them use technology better to meet their goals. Poornima:         So that's great that you've had all this exposure to technology in your career. What ultimately inspired you to start MotherCoders? Tina Lee:            Well, like a lot of people who are inspired to make change, it came from a deep place of pain. Poornima:         Yeah, what was your pain? Tina Lee:            So, I had been trained to do simple things, build simple things: HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript. I even tried learning Ruby for a while. And it was fine until I had my second child, right? The programs that are available to beginners usually happen on the evenings or on the weekend or online. And I felt like because I had just had a baby, my second one, I felt very isolated. So, doing it online felt very lonely and I couldn't make these in-person classes anymore, so out of that I had this vision of like, you know what? I cannot be the only mother, a new mother, who’s experiencing this. I should just organize kind of an informal meet up because my grandmother had met me.                             I had envisioned maybe some grandmas here on the corner and then we'd be doing our thing here. And ultimately what happened was I had so many women that filled out this informal Google Poll that I had about their interest level that I said, "OK. There's enough there to do something more organized." So I ran a pilot out of a co-working space that was empty on Saturdays and just happened to be next to an onsite child care facility center. Poornima:         Wow. Tina Lee:            Yeah. So that we were able to run the classes in the conference rooms and then have the kids be cared for by professional caregivers in a setting that was set up for them. Poornima:         That's awesome. So you really saw the opportunity. One as like a personal pain point that you experienced but then after you do this experiment there were a number of women who were interested. And then from that point, how did you transition into making it the nonprofit that it is today? Tina Lee:            So, I'm all about failing fast and rocket prototyping. So that was kind of my way of experimenting with this model. And because so many women had reached out, ones who could not participate in the pilot for one reason or another, I knew that there were moms out there that were hungry. And once you dig deeper into the numbers it collaborates that, right? I know you had Lisen Stromberg on the show recently and you look at the numbers about how many millennia women are about to become mothers, right? A million a year for the next 10 years or so. And then you look at how millennia women are going to be the largest and the most educated demographic ever, right? And then you look at who’s already a mom now.                                There's just tremendous opportunity to help moms who are either stuck on the sidelines and they want to get into tech but can't. Or they're in a job where they're not touching it and they want to move up. This is a great way to activate them and give them a skill set that will help them stay competitive. And we even have entrepreneurs who feel like they need a bigger tool set. They want like a wider understanding of how the ecosystem’s working so they can really launch their ventures. They come to us for that understanding and then also the community, too. That's a big part of what we do is the community because like I said being a mom is very isolating. Poornima:         Yeah that's fantastic. I'm sure some of our viewers out there who are entrepreneurs will be interested to learn a little bit more. So it’s great that there are going to be all these millennial women who are becoming mothers but I know there's still a problem when it comes to leadership, and as you and I have noticed, within tech itself only 26% of women hold computing jobs. So, how do you think MotherCoders is helping with that? Tina Lee:            Well, couple of things. One, we've kind of discussed this a lot which is a pipeline issue. Yes. We could be graduating more women with degrees in computer science or engineering but we also do a terrible job as a society of helping women thrive once they become mothers, right? No one ever says the term “working dad.” We just assume that— Poornima:         That's true. Tina Lee:            —you're going to be working. Poornima:         Yeah. Tina Lee:            But for mothers, I think as a society, culturally, we're still very ambivalent about how we feel about women working outside the home once they become mothers, but if you think about it, mothers are the people that you work with, right? They're the people sitting around you and they're your cohort next to you that's going to be taking over this role. It’s just the workplace is not set up to help women succeed, right? The IT worker is all in, all the time. Poornima:         Right. Tina Lee:            And if you have caregiving responsibilities, that's impossible, right? And women are kind of pressured to make a choice because there are not...there just aren't the social support systems, right? School lets out at 3. Poornima:         Yeah. Tina Lee:            There's no paid parental leave, right? And a lot of companies are just starting to experiment with flexible work hours, right? So all these things make it very difficult for women who feel like they want to prioritize their families and of course at the same time they're made to choose. Poornima:         Yep. I do remember in Lisen Stromberg's interview we talked about this caregiving bias. So it’s great that you touched upon it. I think you also mentioned in a talk earlier the mommy tax versus the fatherhood bonus. Walk us through why this disparity exists.   Tina Lee:            Oh man, we're going to get sad. OK. So, because of this ideal worker model, right? You're expected to go in all the time. Once you become a mother, everyone knows what that means and what that looks like, right? Based on our certain circumstances. Our current set of circumstances. So, automatically men and women will think, "OK. So this person is either going to be downshifting their careers or they're going to drop out altogether." Right? "And if they do stay they're probably not going to go all in. So let’s put them on the mommy track." So, women aren't left with that many choices right? So the way I frame the mommy tax is that automatically you're considered less valuable.                                 Right? And that will represent...that will manifest itself in salary negotiations, in having projects that will help you reach the next level, in helping you maybe make connections or professional development that will bring you to the next level. So there's a tax not only in real terms in salary but also a tax in terms of the opportunity cost.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            Of what you could have done if you didn't become a mother in the eyes of the employer. Now it’s such a powerful bias that women who aren't even mothers get hit by it right? I mean how many stories have we heard of women walking in to pitch their companies or trying to get a job and they say, “Are you going to be pregnant?” Or, “You're married, do you plan to have kids anytime soon?” Not only is that illegal.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            That automatically kind of primes everyone in the room to think like, "Oh, right. You're a woman. There's a high chance that you'll become a mother and you're just going to peace out at some point and why should we invest in you." Right? So that's the motherhood penalty. On the flip side, the opposite is happening to men. "Oh! You're going to become a dad? This means you're going to be...you're going to be going in even harder because now you're responsible for caring for a family, right? You should be given the best projects because you really need to get to the next level. And you really should get a salary bump because now you're responsible for all these people."   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So it’s just a very unfair situation where women are getting hit by this mommy tax and dads are not. And women are already a lot of times behind because of the gender pay gap that they came into before all this even happened.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            Oh and for every child that you have, additional child, you get hit a little bit more.   Poornima:         What can we do to sort of alleviate this? Or what...what can people do to sort of empower themselves?   Tina Lee:            Well, I think we need to talk about it in several levels, right? One is the individual level. One may be at the company level. And then one at a society level. So I'm going to start personal. Personally, I think one of the strategies that I've employed is you really have to take stock of your own capacity.   Poornima:         Mm-hmm.   Tina Lee:            What are my goals? What are my passions? What do I want to do? What capacity do I have in terms of caregiving? Do I have family to help me out? Do I have friends? Do I live in a community where there's support systems? So all of these things have to be taken into consideration. And I specifically stayed in a neighborhood in San Francisco that has a high density of in-home child care providers, and preschools, and great elementary schools to kind of situate myself where I would have these resources available to me. Other people move in, their parents.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Other people move closer to their parents. Everyone has a different situation, right? And I'm lucky in that I have a great partner. So all of these things help me succeed. But on a company level, what would make it even better, as I mentioned earlier, some flexible schedules. If I have a role where I pretty much can do work without being physically in the office, I should be allowed to do that, right?   Poornima:         Yep.   Tina Lee:            And if I happen to work with other people who are caregiving, not just kids but for their parents, or they happen to do other things in the community, they should be given that right, too. So having this flexibility actually benefits everyone in the company.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Paid parental leave is huge, right? And also really thinking about how to combat that implicit bias against women and mothers, right? And that kind of speaks to the larger problem of the societal expectation that women are expected to provide caregiving and men are not, that women should stay home after they have kids, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            And the reality is that our society's changing, women are more educated, they're working. Forty-five percent of families with kids under 18 now have two working parents working full time to stay afloat, right? And so the reality is that we need to change some policies around how we support parents in general, caregivers in general. And I'm really glad that people like Sheryl Sandberg through *Lean In*, Emily Slaughter through her books, and then Lisa, too, are really tackling this societal piece because we can't change. We're not going to see change until we have culture change and I think that's a long-term thing that needs to happen.   Poornima:         So let’s bring it back to the struggle to stay relevant, right? You take a pause for parenthood, or you downshift, or maybe you don't even downshift, but there's this perception that you are downshifting. So I think it’s great that there are retraining programs like yours. How do you see these programs evolving overtime?   Tina Lee:            I don't know.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            That's the honest answer.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            I don't know, because—   Poornima:         But you see people embracing them?   Tina Lee:            Yes, people are embracing them, but I think we're at the beginning stages of just having this consciousness that tech is moving really fast.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            We live in this world where you have to continuously learn in order to stay relevant whether you're a caregiver or not, right?   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            That's why companies invest in professional development budgets and provide access to online training courses or learning plans. So I think we as a society know that people need to stay fresh on top of the skills and understand how fast things are changing in the industries, right? And that's why they invest in the professional development piece, but they also will have to come up with new ways of providing those to people who may not have the capacity to go to the one-week conference.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Or the “take three months off to learn how to become a full-stack web developer” type of programs, right? Those all-in programs are going to be very challenging for people with caregiving responsibilities and that's why you don't see an influx of caregivers in those types of boot camps or in online learning, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Because as I spent time in ED School, I know that learning is very social and I'm a big believer that context is important. It’s great if you learn how to speak French by yourself, at home, in front of a computer but if—   Poornima:         No, I tried that. I have a terrible accent.   Tina Lee:            But yeah it would be better if you had actually visited France.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            If you understood French culture and maybe even had some French friends and had a French meal. So it brings it all together and that's kind of the experience that we aim for because it’s not just the skills. It has to happen in context.   Poornima:         Yeah. So why teach these technical skills? Why not just get people to get better at management skills or some of the other softer skills? Why do you want to focus on tech skills?   Tina Lee:            I think tech is transforming our economy. It’s just going to be one of those things that we take for granted, right? And having that literacy is going to empower you to think about your own industry differently. And it’s going to impact the way you approach a problem differently. And I think once moms gain that level of tech literacy, it just gives them a level of confidence to approach this new phase in their life differently because a world of opportunity will open up, right? I think before in the beginning, when things were still very technical to the point where you had to have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree to understand it, then it was less accessible.                                 But now we're at the point where we've automated a lot of these things and made it a little bit more friendly. And I think if you're really going to innovate, it's just as important to understand the problems in the industry and then figure out the technical piece that goes along with that. And I think there's enough room for everyone to participate in that exercise.   Poornima:         So why don't we talk a little bit about the type of people you see coming to your program, other coders—are these people that are outside of tech? Or are they people within tech who maybe were on the business side and then wanted to transition into the technical side?   Tina Lee:            So, after running five cohorts now, some patterns are emerging, right? We mainly see women who are working moms and they want to get technical but can't find a solution that works with them because of scheduling or child care issues. They know that their path to career advancement requires them to gain this new skill set, right? So they want access to it and we provide that for them. Another group of moms who come to us, like you mentioned earlier, they may have stepped out for a little bit. A year, six months, some even 10 years, right? And they're just looking for a refresh. To figure out a way to connect their passions to a path forward.   And then the last group, these are entrepreneurs who have an idea for an app or they are already on their way to building a company and they just realize, like, "Hey, I'm kind of stuck now and I can't proceed without a grander understanding of what it is I'm trying to do and how to go about it." And so they come to us. So those are kind of the three groups that we see. In terms of industry background, they just run across the gamut. We have moms who worked in a startup only on the operations side. So they wanted to get closer to moms who were scientists, who are working in a lab. And they're like you know what? I actually want to do something else because it enables me to be more creative. So just really all over the map in terms of industry background.   Poornima:         And how do you go about doing the teaching?   Tina Lee:            So, we have a three-pronged approach. As I mentioned before, it’s not just the technical skills.   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            So, we teach a little bit of code. All the moms are taught HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a basic website and how to launch it, but the goal of that really is to give them a taste of it, to see how it feels to build something and put it out into the world, and to really check themselves. “Do I like this enough to keep going?”   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Right? Or, “Is this enough? Or do I pivot?” The second piece that goes along with that is the community piece. So we bring in women from the field, like yourself, and we create this community not only of people who could mentor them, but people who provide access to job opportunities. And then of course they have each other.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Right? They can go to conferences together. They can just go to a café and help each other. And having that nerd mom comradery is really essential to success because, sometimes in the middle of the night and there's no one else there, you can feel like you can ping someone.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            And then the last piece that we do, right, technical, community, and the last piece is the childcare piece, right? And that childcare piece really helps moms figure out in a safe space if this is something they want to go further. Right? And I would also argue that another piece of it is context. Although it’s hard to explain to people what I mean by that. What I mean by that is all of this is happening within context of what we see in everyday life and that piece of context is provided by the community, right? You come in and explain we use agile and that's what it means in our shop.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Or we believe in rapid prototyping and design thinking and that's how it works in our shop. Right? So all of these things are relevant. Not just the building part or not just the hanging-out-with-your-people part.   Poornima:         So that's great. So how do you pick a cohort?   Tina Lee:            We pick a cohort the way I would build a team.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            So because...before I used to be a technical rep, I spent some time being a recruiter, and having that safe space for learning is really important. And I realize how hard it is to do this when you are a mother as well. So I work with my board and we have several steps to our application process, the last one of which is an in-person interview.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Where we really talk to the moms. “Are we right for you? Are you ready for this?” Because a lot of learning will have to happen outside of the classroom too, right? So they have to have capacity and they have to be really clear about why they're doing it because otherwise you're not going to stick to it and it's not going to feel like you achieved something at the end, right? So we walk them through that. And it’s worked out pretty well. All the moms come together and I think because being a mother is such a democratizing experience they all show up as people who are there to support each other, and want to learn together, and move forward together.   Poornima:         So walk us through what a day in the life of MotherCoders looks like.   Tina Lee:            Sure.   Poornima:         For your students.   Tina Lee:            So, Saturday only classes right? You would go...you would drop off your baby. So we have a half an hour transition time. It takes a while to explain have they eaten, have they slept, all that stuff.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            So you hand off to the caregiver and you're in your seat by 10:00 right?   And then you learn until noon. And then we have lunch together. We always have lunch catered because it's such a special time and they have to bond. And a lot of times we'll have speakers there too, right, who will stay and hang out with them. So it’s a great time to just kind of network and talk. And then after lunch they learn some more. And then around 3, we leave half an hour for reflection. So I'm big on you learn, but at the end of the day, you have to pause and really connect what happened to how you're feeling about it and how it connects to your own understanding of the work, OK? And then after that they pick up their kid and then they go.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            In terms of content, it will vary by day. We have specific build days where people just get together and they build and we help you work through your wireframes and your issues. There are days when we have lectures. We don't really have a lot of lectures. We have “discussions,” I should call them. And then there are other days when we have guest speakers who come in and they talk about a topic that they want to talk about, or they do a workshop, or something I've been doing is I've been pairing a cyber security info sec expert with data scientists.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So on one side you have data scientists who want like all the data, and then the other side you have people who are in charge of the data or making sure they're following the rules about data and saying, "Whoa." So that's been a very illuminating conversation, too. So we've been doing stuff like that.   Poornima:         That sounds great. So how many people have you graduated? You mentioned you have five cohorts coming who have gone through the program?   Tina Lee:            Thirty-four so far.   Poornima:         Great. OK.   Tina Lee:            Yeah we're really delighted because 34 moms represents families, right?   Tina Lee:            And there is over 50 kids. And another way to think about this is we've placed 34 stem role models.   Poornima:         Oh, great.   Tina Lee:            Right? Into homes. They are inspiring our next generation of kids. Right? So not only are these women changing the trajectory of their own family like right now, their kids are going to be impacted, too. So we're really looking at this from a multi-generational perspective.   Poornima:         Yeah. That's fantastic. So what are some immediate outcomes that you see from them graduating in the program?   Tina Lee:            Jobs!   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            They're getting jobs.   Poornima:         Good. OK.   Tina Lee:            They're getting jobs in tech, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So we have moms who have become front end engineers. We have moms who have become mobile app developers. We have moms who have become user experience designers. Some have been promoted, of course, because now they have this new tool kit. And then we have other moms who are proceeding with their startup dreams. So potentially, right, we have entrepreneurs out there. So, this has been really exciting to see them grow.   Poornima:         That's great. So it’s a lot of variety of outcomes but all pretty positive.   Tina Lee:            Mm-hmm.   Poornima:         So how do you measure success for MotherCoders?   Tina Lee:            Right now the way we're measuring success is completion.   We're also looking at how diverse we are in terms of the people that we have in our classes. Right? I'm an intersectional feminist.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Eighty-one percent of women become moms and if companies are really worried about diversity? I'm like, “Come to me, because we have queer moms, we have moms that emigrated from other countries, like just everybody.” We just think about it racially, religiously, geographically, right? So the way we measure success—there's a piece of the diversity piece, and then there's a completion piece, and then we're starting to track not only who got jobs or who got promoted, but how much did they increase their income?   Poornima:         Oh, great.   Tina Lee:            Or earning potential? Right?   And that's been tricky because we've been running cohorts and it takes time. And different moms have different capacities, as I mentioned. And some of them have kids, again.   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            Because moms do. So, we're trying to figure out a way to tell that story better but just anecdotally because there are only 34 moms, I keep pretty close tabs on them.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            I know that they are making more money because some are buying new homes.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Some are buying new other things.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            And they're updating their LinkedIn profiles and LinkedIn tells me that, right?   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            So we know that they're getting skills, getting new jobs, buying homes, and on top of that, starting businesses.   Poornima:         So I love that you care about this diversity piece, and I do, too. So I'm going to ask you this question: What about Father Coders? You know there's a lot of stay-at-home dads that's becoming less and less of a stigma, but would you ever be open to allowing men to come in and participate in your program?   Tina Lee:            Not in the foreseeable future.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            And here’s why, right? The reason why we don't do Father Coders is exactly the same reasons why we do MotherCoders, right?   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Think about it from a kind of a cultural perspective.   I have actually gone to meetups and programs. They're very friendly. Not that they're not friendly to women, but in terms of belonging, I think women have a harder time feeling a sense of belonging in those spaces, right? And you walk into a room and you don't see anyone who looks like you...it's very intimidating and there's a lot of trepidation around going back again.   So we create this safe space where we know that women will find inviting, right? And I think mothers specifically have a very unique set of challenges, right? That go beyond just being a woman, right? The scheduling, the feeling of pressure to be the perfect mom, and the perfect spouse, and the perfect worker, all the perfect things, right? And then on top of that picking up skills and working in an industry that's predominantly men is very intimidating, right?   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            So all of that comes together in MotherCoders. And I understand that fathers have the same challenges with scheduling, but I bet you they would feel less trepidation walking into a space that was designed more for someone without the challenges that moms have.   And we actually have had conversations with women who come up to me and say, "I'm not a mother but I care for a family member. Can I come?"   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So I can see at some point that we rethink our structure.   Poornima:         Oh I see. Right.   Tina Lee:            But we exist for the same reason that Hackbright exists and Women's Colleges exist.   I graduated out of a Women's College. So all of those things still stand and until we kind of break apart some of those barriers to women I think I need to keep doing what I'm doing now.   Poornima:         Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we end?   Tina Lee:            Yes, I would love to share with you kind of my pie-in-the-sky kind of vision that I'm working towards, right? Women from all all over the U.S. and the world reach out to me and ask when we're coming to their communities.   Poornima:         OK. Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So I know there's a desire for this type of training program all over and we're trying to figure out a way to get there. And we envision ourselves being in any community that wants to have a MotherCoders but, because, you'd know, technology varies by geography, and industry, and all these different things. We want to design a program that's thoughtful enough and flexible enough where they can design it to fit their local conditions, right? To fit the needs of their local employers so that moms will have a place to move to. So we are moving towards that. We are actively fundraising towards that.   And the reason that we're a nonprofit is because we're committed to helping women who cannot afford to pay $10,000 for Bootcamp or they're not sure if they want to invest in that even before having tried out something more preliminary. So we are working towards a vision where we're all across America, if not the world, so that we could help women everywhere as they transition into being moms and thrive in the workplace.   Poornima:         Great. So how can we help you with that?   Tina Lee:            Well, help us get our word out. This is great, right?   Help us send moms who are interested in taking our program to us. I would also love it if employers who are worried about retaining moms that they have to provide professional development for them through us. And then also figure out a way to maybe work with us to develop programs or return ships where women who may have stepped off want to get a refresh and then go back.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So those are great ways. And then of course, we're always looking for donations, always looking for sponsorships. So many ways to partner with us and everything can be found on our website.   Poornima:         Wonderful. Well we'll be sure to include the link to it.   Tina Lee:            Thank you.   Poornima:         Thank you again for joining us, Tina. Thank you for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your team, your employer, and of course, all the mothers that you know to get the word out. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode of *Femgineer TV*. Ciao for now.    

Based in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy is focused on teaching women how to code. We're recording several interviews with Hackbright graduates including our guest today, Chloe Condon. Growing up in a family of artists in the Bay Area, Chloe ended up working at startups by day and performing as a theater actress by night. Prior to her current role as a Developer Evangelist at Codefresh, Chloe held a number of jobs including an Account Executive at Yelp and an office manager role at another startup. In one of her previous jobs working as an Executive Assistant to the CEO of NewCo, she attended an event that changed her life and put her on a trajectory to study software engineering through Hackbright Academy.

This time out we spoke with Noelle Daley who shared her experiences at New Relic moving developer relations to being a developer via a programming bootcamp. We also discussed Ed’s latest round of work promoting OSMI and Noelle’s talk she gave at OSBridge in Portland. Do these things! Check out our sponsors WonderNetwork and Grumpy Learning Buy stickers at devhell.info/shop Follow us on Twitter here Rate us on iTunes here Listen Download now (MP3) Links and Notes Noelle on Twitter Noelle polished up her developer skills at HackBright She works on the New Relic APM product It’s pretty awesome that New Relic provides opportunities for people to transition into different types of jobs Ed’s local newspaper talked about his work on OSMI Chris had a great time at PHP Southcoast He also got to hangout with 1300 fellow co-workers in London Perl 5’s super-chill release manager Open Source Bridge Find out what conferences are accepting papers at The CFP Report

I explain my experiences with some exceptional Hackbright alum and self reflect how I feel as a Black person in tech and share my goal of getting involved with the Hack the Hood organization. *I also do not mention, but there is also Black Girls Code branch based in Oakland.

Angie Chang (@thisgirlangie) joined us to talk about the coding bootcamp Hackbright Academy, their upcoming hardware hackathon, Girl Geek Dinners, and the extreme awkwardness of networking. Sign up to be a hackathon mentor (not gender limited) or to be on the waitlist to attend (women only). Get your team together on Hackathon IO. Sign up to be a Hackbright Academy mentor. Oh look! Elecia signed up to speak on Sunday! Grace Hopper Conference The article on Peter Thiel and women founders by Kate Losse that Chris referenced toward the end of the show.