Girls Develop It Weekend Adventures- Intro to Javascript

Even though I didn’t have the “official” prerequisite classes of HTML and CSS for the JavaScript class offered by sister Meetup group, Girls Develop it, I decided on Friday that I wanted to take the weekend class and signed up.

The class is held at the Turing Development school and it was a great downtown location.  Very centralized, no matter if you’re North, South, East or West of the city and the venue is a school, so it’s set up with plenty of power, WiFi and projector with multiple screens.  It had started another spring time snow, so I was one of the first ones in the class that morning, but we quickly got situated-  about 25 female students all there to learn JavaScript!  I don’t think I’ve seen that many women in one technical class in my life and no matter how much I love hanging out with the guys that I do in the Oracle realm, this was a refreshing change.  The room was filled with women of all ages, all walks of life and no, I was not the only woman in the room with brightly colored streaks in her hair, tattoos or multiple piercings.

Now if you haven’t already done so, I recommend joining Meetup and checking out the groups that are in your area of interest.  I run three groups, (RMOUG Women in Technology, Raspberry Pi and STEM and Girl Geek Dinners of Boulder/Denver)  I’m also part of a number of other groups, including the Big Data, Women who Code and Girls Who Develop It Meetup, which this one day class was offered by.  At $80, it was a great opportunity to dig into a new language and gain a strong introduction to a computer language, even if you didn’t have any previous experience.

Through the day, we learned how to build out a main page, test code through the console log, incorporate java script into our pages and best practices of beginning Java Script.

Now there are two things I will share with you that I feel are great tips from this class that are available to everyone.  It’s two sites for opportunities to continue with your web design/JavaScript education and they are:

1.  CodePen–  This site demonstrates different examples of webcode, broken down between HTML, CSS and JavaScript, (any combination of 1,2 or all 3…) and you can make changes to the code to see how it impacts the outcome of the graphics and framework.  It really puts how these three interact to build out impressive web designs and where you would use one over another.
2. Exercism–  This site gives you real world coding problems, allows you to code a solution, submit the solution for valuable feedback.  It’s important to use what you learn every day to improve upon it.  This site gives that opportunity to you.