Bakersfieldâs Female Programming Champion
By Alyssa Haerle | Bakersfield, CA
This is part four in a blog series called âDoing Tech Business in Bakersfieldâ.
You might think that Bakersfield would be a tough place to be a female programmer. If it is, I certainly couldnât tell, because Beth Armitage makes it look easy.
The Cal State University Bakersfield Computer Science senior and graduate of Bakersfield College is one of the up and coming programming talents of Kern County. I cannot say how her experience in school or out in the community has been like as a woman in tech, but I do know the local tech community has massive respect for her and her skills. Bethâs team won Bakersfieldâs first public hackathon âDistill Your Ideaâ, where they built a cohesive and functional application in under three days.
The KIT Community recently sat down for coffee with Beth to talk about her experience at the hackathon and in the tech community.
First of all, what was your winning tech idea at the competition?
My teamâs idea was âWhatâs Happeningâ, a social events web application that pulls events from barsâ and other venueâs Facebook pages and puts them all in one place. Users can also request certain types of events, like a karaoke night, so businesses can see what consumers want in terms of events. âWhatâs Happeningâ also has the ability for exponential feedback, because it reaches the Facebook friends of each user that chooses to share an event they would like through the app. It would be able to track that post to count likes and pull comments. If 5 users have 100 Facebook friends that see their post, we just reached 500 people.
Tell us the story of how you developed the idea and formed a team.
I knew we could do planning beforehand and met with people who were going to the event. I also invited some friends that I thought I might want to work with. We brainstormed ideas. Initially, we wanted to do something for the safety theme, but we had trouble coming up with an idea we liked. Then we thought of an event application, because there are no good central places to get that information in an easy to use, easy to find way. Then at the competition, we managed to convince others to join our team, who hadnât chosen a team yet.
What do you think about the experience?
Very fun. I got to work with a more experienced developer, which really helped. I learned a lot. I also got to learn the business side, which I hadnât even considered before. The competition wasnât high pressure or stressful like I thought itâd be.
Other students were a little intimidated by the event and decided not to attend. But you didnât.
Iâll admit I was a little nervous to participate at first. I wasnât sure if I should encourage some of my classmates to attend, because I wasnât sure how it would turn out, but I was ready for the challenge. As the event progressed, I was more and more glad I decided to participate. It started with high energy to get us going, and went smoothly throughout the weekend. Iâm excited for any future hackathons that KIT holds.
What are the biggest thing you achieved over the weekend personally?
To be able to take a good sounding idea and represent it as a usable program in such a short amount of time with people Iâve never worked with. I was lucky to work with such motivated and bright people. Jacob Sherman is the coolest programmer ever. He contributed to the technical implementation of the application, and was really fun to work with. I was astonished at how quickly he picked up Angular, despite never having worked with it before. It was great to work with a more experienced developer to bounce ideas off of and solve problems with.
The business side was taken care of by Paige Loya and Jonathan Prine. I couldnât believe that Paige was actually reaching out to local businesses to push them to add events to Facebook. She even created a test page called âThe Madre Motelâ (go like it on Facebook!) to be able to pull data from. She also took action when I told her we needed to harvest a list of page IDs from local bars and breweries. Â She found their pages, and pulled their ID numbers for us. Jonathan really helped polish our idea and create a business plan to make our app successful. He really sold our idea and built a fiscal plan for businesses that want to sign up for a premium account.
Overall, each member took action and I really couldnât have done it without them. We all won. I agree with Jacob, when after we were announced as the winners, he mentioned that he felt like we won twice because overall, the weekend was a lot of fun.
How has working with the local tech community helped supplement your CSUB experience?
The biggest thing is the ability to apply industry knowledge to classwork. Iâve gained more experience using tools like version control. Version control is a system where a code base is managed. It lets multiple users work on the same project at the same time, and allows the work to be easily integrated. It allows users to track changes and revert to previous versions. If I have made several updates, and notice that part of the code is not working as expected when tested, I can see what I changed in order to track down how to fix it.
Iâve also been able to get experience in product applications like security, a topic not covered in any of the classes I took, because, I donât know, they didnât have time or something. Itâs really important to know though.
Itâs really nice to feel like part of the tech community. I wouldnât have gotten as much out of CSUB without working with the tech community.
Youâve had an internship and mentor in the tech community, right?
Yes, I really wouldnât have gotten where I am today without the mentorship of Kevin Mershon. He is such an awesome programmer, and to be able to learn from him has been more than I could ever ask for. I met him when I was a student at Bakersfield College. I was able to job shadow him to be able to get a real world perspective on programming, and from there he took me in and started teaching me industry knowledge that school couldnât supply. I really look up to him and hope to be as good a developer as him someday. Programming aside, heâs also been a good friend. Thereâs been many times I hit a wall in school and I forget how much Iâve learned. His confidence in me really helped keep me going.
I currently work for a local software company, Mershon Enterprises, Kevinâs company. The job includes membership at the MESH cowork space. I go to the programming meetups there too, the ones that donât conflict with class. I participate in the MESH and KIT events, too.
What is it about Bakersfield that you think makes it difficult to develop a new tech idea?
Difficult to get a wide base of users. The tech community is small, less people than other areas. I guess thatâs the biggest difficulty. It doesnât seem like thereâs a big difference to other places, except size.
What about for your teamâs tech idea?
Overall, the finished product would probably do pretty well in Bakersfield. People like apps on their phone, and people like to go to events. If the app were fully built out, it could be used to find local events in other cities as well. For development, a larger tech community would help because there would be more people to choose from to help develop the idea, and more developers who have more experience.
What might make it easier?
Thereâs a coworking space to work at, MESH. The coworking space is a quiet space to work at with other people working on similar stuff. Other programmers. There arenât people like at Starbucks asking if Iâm hacking a computer.
Thatâs actually happened to you?!
Yes, I was working on my senior project one day at Starbucks and some guy sitting next to me working at his own computer looked over my shoulder and said, âYou arenât hacking my computer are you?â I politely told him no, Iâm a Computer Science student working on some homework. I then showed him my senior project, Sequoia Grove, an employee scheduling application.
People at MESH understand when I explain what Iâm working on. Theyâll even help and give me advice. It makes my work better. Thereâs also plenty of people here, who are interested in learning. But itâs also difficult to find one place to go to for events in Bakersfield, so there would be a need for our app locally.
If you could wish for ONE thing to change, what would it be?
Having learned so much from a mentor outside of school, I would really like to see a mentorship program at school. Not only for Computer Science majors, but for all majors, where students can connect with industry professionals and get a head start on the information they need to know for the real world coming from real world professionals. In addition, it would be cool if the Computer Science department specifically offered some lectures from industry professionals where we would be able to learn a new concept or topic. Something we could expand on in our free time. As a Computer Science student, if we can learn a cool new concept or tool that gives us the possibility to expand on, we then have our summer free time covered.
Finally, tell about your experience as a female programmer in an industry of mostly guys.
When I took my first programming class at Bakersfield College, I didnât even realize the lack of female programmers. When I transferred to CSUB, I did feel a little out of place at first, but it might have been the pressure of being at a 4 year university. Overall, my classmates have treated me with respect as a fellow student, aside from maybe one or two outliers.
In my experience with the industry, I really feel welcome and respected overall by industry professionals. Iâve been built up by more experienced developers locally that have offered advice or complimented my code or technical skills.
I do want to share one story though that made me mad. I overheard a man presenting his company for a proposed technical collaboration on a project with a different company in an environment where everyone in the room could be assumed to be in the tech industry. As he was trying to sell his collaboration, he was describing his company as âvery much of a guy environmentâ. He said that they would tear each otherâs ideas down in order to make them better. Then he looked right at me, and abruptly changed the topic with the other company representative. Does his company not make an effort to hire technical women? What makes a guy environment better than a diverse one? I immediately felt unwelcome, and left some time after that.Â
Overall, life is what I make of it. I have the ability overlook a snide comment, and I can decide to not aspire to work for companies that arenât welcoming to everyone. I do have a passion to help get more women interested in the tech industry because I feel like I would have been further along at this point if I had discovered it earlier in life.
Be like Beth. She is awesome.
If you are interested in learning more about Beth and following her work, you can visit her website: http://bethgrace5.github.io/app/index.
This article is part four of the âDoing Tech Business in Bakersfieldâ blog series of the Kern Innovation & Technology (KIT) Community. We will be updating this series every other week. If you would like to be featured in our blog for this series, send us an email at [email protected].
To read previous blogs in this series, click on the links below:
Part 1. Doing Tech Business in a Handshake Town
Part 2. What is Online Marketing Worth?
Part 3. 8 Lessons from Kernâs 1st Public Hackathon
