Why I like the Community
I Participated as a mentor for the Ladies Learning Code (LLC) - Ruby Workshop, volunteering at these events has been a great experience for me. I highly recommend it for fellow developers, and engineers.
Since the feedback system isn’t web accessible and public knowledge, below is my response to the interesting portion of their feedback email 1
1) Why did you attend this Ladies Learning Code workshop?
Ruby is awesome, Rails is awesome because of it. I believe getting on the web is important for many professions, ruby and it’s framework rails, raise the bar for web development and web applications. Woman have a lesser voice in computing, I believe it’s due to a lack of web presence.
2) What was your FAVOURITE part and LEAST favourite part of the workshop?
Favorite Part: Seeing others striving to understand and to share in a group setting. I am an introvert by nature, the Center for Social Innovation and Ladies Learning Code are excellent initiatives for making tough problems approachable and fun. Also, seeing all the mentors come out, I met Matt (who was finding himself in a CTO position and working hard in Toronto) he was awesome. We got to talk shop, and we had some fun together, great guy.
Worst Part: Dealing with the older Lady in the back who had a 5-10 year old pc-windows-laptop-thing that was all enterprise junked up and super slow to work on. Just one of the reasons I’m on a Mac laptop. It was so draining to get her setup and learning, she was approx. 20-minutes behind the class. Plus she was an older woman, so she has a slower learning rate (not her fault). The whole experience had me very upset, but I had my calm-face on and stayed cheery for her sake while I got her though, and all caught up. The neat thing is that I was able to move and help someone else, and some other mentor took over. Because of that, she was able to get fresh patience, and really attentive advice. Later I saw her working away happily. So that was awesome. I believe switching my attention benefited both of us, and we continued on the day working at full capacity. That’s what it’s all about. (Note: I have been told by many people that I am extremely patient, so for me to become fed up is a feat to congratulate the ms-windows platform on)
3) Feedback on the Lead Instructor(s)
Ryan Brunner and Brad Robertson from influitive.com. They were great, tag-teamed very well. Teaching a classroom of people a new programming language is tough, there are so many double meanings for words and technical lingo. I think they were excellent.
[1] : they were using google forms to collect the data
Notes:
As a side note, to stay on top of Ladies Learning Code events I can volunteer for and help out, I’ve been watching their feed in my rss reader, it’s been working well. I can safely recommend it to other developers. http://ladieslearningcode.com/category/events/feed/rss2