This season we set out to honour Code Academy‘s Code Year Challenge to make 2012 the year we helped our non-coding members learn a language.
And what a resounding success! 85+ women packed the house at Centre St. Pierre and spent 3 hours with Anna Filina and our kick-ass volunteer TAs to get a little up close and personal with PHP. Everyone brought their own A-game, and some even brought their spouses and teenagers!
Anna took us all through functions, variables, expressions, arrays and had us concatenating in no time! Her patience and geek humour helped an overwhelming majority of those who had never coded before get through their first exercises. It wasn’t easy for all, but watching everyone in the room persevere was inspiring for all of us.
Hip hip array!
Tenacity, excitement and upbeat can-do spirits spread online, too! Here is a small selection of tweets from the evening:
Learning PHP code for dummies at #mtlggPHP with @danyricher .Finally seeing the light!!
— Annik Joly RE/MAX (@AnnikJolyREMAX) April 27, 2012
coding php is easier than i thought! yeah@mtlgirlgeeks @foolab @afilina #mtlggPHP #TELUSHosting
— Aveline Sodji (@avelinesodji) April 27, 2012
learning about arraysat #mtlggPHP thanks to @MTLGirlGeeksand #TELUShosting — Kelly Johnson (@LifeOptimist) April 27, 2012
Just PHP’d all over myself! #mtlggPHP — Leann Brown (@Leannzing) April 27, 2012
Learning PHP is great, but meeting a bunch of girls who like PHP is even better! A huge thanks to the organizers! #mtlggPHP #TelusHosting — Atelier Carmel (@AtelierCarmel) April 27, 2012
Just spent my first evening coding. Got my butt kicked but I liked it! #TELUShosting #mtlggPHP — Amanda Durepos (@amandadurepos) April 27, 2012
Really enjoyed an evening of pure PHP goodness! Thanks to @MTLGirlGeeks @afilina #mtlggPHP #TELUShosting for the great workshop! — Anne Fortin (@kilikko) April 27, 2012
Thanks @MTLGirlGeeks and @FooLabca for #mtlggPHP, it was inspiring to be in the same room with so many ladies learning to code! — Andrea Merlano (@andreamerlano) April 27, 2012
I actually managed to make my own php script at the Girl Geek event in MTL! Woot! #mtlggPHP — Wahiaronkwas David (@bear_feet) April 27, 2012
Thanks @MTLGirlGeeks for the great night! I actually manage to write my own PHP script today! Wow!!
#mtlggPHP
— Laurence Bakayoko (@ZebreSolidaire) April 27, 2012
@MTLGirlGeeks @afilina @foolabca Thank you so much for the #mtlggPHP workshop last night! I learned a bit; my 14-year-old son even more.
— Stephanie O’Hanley (@stephohanley) April 27, 2012
TAs FTW!
To add to our first-time coder buzz, our amazing TAs for the evening shared some of their wonderful experiences helping the group. Alex Bowyer emailed us this heart-warming anecdote from when we were all packing up and getting ready to leave the centre:
One of the girls asked me for some help just as I was about to leave. “Sure” I said. She had a look of determination; “I really want to get this working, I feel like I’m close,” she told me.
And she was… she had the three functions written, just had a few syntax errors and a little confusion about the overall execution flow.
I spent five minutes with her, helping her fix her syntax and debugging and commenting out the previous exercises…Before long she was able to run her script. First time there was an error, but we fixed that and then: BOOM.
The nine-character generated password appeared in the console and suddenly the look of concern disappeared and she was literally beaming.“Oh wow!” she said, amazed at what she’d done.
She was really proud of her achievement, and you could see from her face she was going to be leaving happy because she did it!
I could tell she had that whole “I made this” feeling, you know: I’ve felt it myself.
And that made me really happy, it’s so rewarding to help someone like that and teach them to fish for themselves rather than give them a fish. Made me want to do more teaching!
Wow. What more can we say…?
THANK YOU!
A huge thank you to Anna and our amazing TAs for making the event such a big success. Also, to all who came and gave it a go!!! Whether it sticks or not, learning to look at technology as creators instead of only as consumers is valuable on any level, we hope you left with new insights.
Our PHP Workshop was made possible by our generous and kick-ass sponsors: TELUS Shared Hosting and FooLab. Their support helped us provide this session for free, keeping it accessible to our awesome community of women. Many thanks!
Shout-out to Montreal Python’s Intro to Python for Women Workshop, and Ladies Learning Code over in the t-dot, these great initiatives inspired us to host our own.
Anna’s Slides
Want More?
Check out of our photos in the album on Facebook.
TELUS Hosting & Domain Winner!
This month, Archinodes’ lightning quick turn-around on a thoughtful blog post (and much tweeting) is FTW! Congrats on winning our Telus Shared Hosting & domain tweetaway! We’ll be in touch to coordinate your prize.
