Basia

My interest in coding began when I was inspired by a friend who changed careers after a coding workshop. We both came from a liberal arts background and had no previous experience in tech. I asked her how she got started and was inspired by her resulting projects, ideas, and opportunities. So this led to taking a couple of free courses through Codecademy. However, I kept getting stuck in the practicalities of how to apply the languages I learned to a final product, so I started looking around at different workshops and programs but nothing worked for me. Everything I found was during work hours and outside of my price range.

I first heard about SheCodes through an Instagram ad.

I decided to join the SheCodes workshop to see if it would get me further than other coding courses I’d taken and it did. I walked away after two days with concrete results and I learned how to actually apply the languages I was using.

Prior to SheCodes I held a variety of roles which ranged from event planning and investor relations, to analytical and research-based roles. In each of these positions, I felt a gap in my understanding of tech and the people on my teams that handled our websites, products, and internal programs and processes.

SheCodes was a great introduction to coding and at this point, I think almost everybody in any role should have some basic knowledge of front end v back end, design, and development.

The small group and personal feedback in SheCodes+ helped refine my understanding. I loved the format of the course - we had one class in-person and one class at home each week. It fit very well into my busy schedule and worked well for long term retention as we reviewed and introduced topics remotely at the beginning of the week and got hands-on experience with immediate feedback later in the week. And having a product to work towards made me internalize the languages much faster. I loved having final presentations at the end where we could encourage each other and also laugh at our struggles.

It was fantastic learning with other women. Too often I hear women putting themselves down, especially when it comes to STEM fields, and in this context I heard women building each other up and stepping up to a challenge.

Apparently it is quite a challenge to build an app in React over the course of a couple of weeks - but we did it simply because we signed up to do so. It was encouraging to learn with other smart, engaged, logical and creative women.

We are each directly addressing the gap in female representation in these fields, and I appreciate SheCodes for creating a space to do this.

I have not and don't currently plan to change careers. However,

I would like to use coding as a stepping stone to developing my own projects - to have greater freedom and ability to develop my own ideas and bring them into the world.

Also, I really enjoy coding. It’s very interesting and exciting. I love seeing immediate products of getting code right and wrong, and fully controlling the output of my work.

My current role centers on analysis and research. I'm an independent consultant at the moment, so I have quite a bit of freedom in how I define my work and focus.

I think my coding knowledge will enable me to potentially automate some aspects of my work

...maybe start building databases in a very different way, start playing with data differently, or it could impact my data gathering.

No matter what your career goals,

SheCodes will be a fantastic way to expand your horizons. Depending on how you approach it, this can be a fast-track way to change or enhance your career. Alternatively, you could also look at it as personal growth outside of a career.

Either way, if you put in the work and effort, you will learn and grow very quickly as a coder.