LadyCoders

[ladycoders-blog]

All we can say is: Thank You.

We are profoundly honored and proud that you're supporting the dream of helping skilled, technically inclined women to get into programming jobs.

While we're still overwhelmed from the response and controversy of the last few days, we can say this: it's never wrong to stay positive and stay on message. 

We will keep you all updated as the project goes forward; Liz, Lorraine, and I are meeting in about 36 hours to do a marathon planning meeting for our thank yous, the backer rewards, our responses, and a few exciting bits of news that we're going to be able to share. 

Each and every one of you has worked unbelievably hard to help the women who will benefit from this project. We're grateful...and exhausted! Give us a chance to catch a few zzzz's, and we'll be back at it again in the morning. You've given us the ability to start real change, and you've given these women a chance at a future that may have seemed cloudy to them at first, but can now be clear as day.

Thank you.

Liz, Lorraine, and Tarah

The LadyCoders

[ladycoders-blog]

5 hours to go!

Kickstarter link

As you already know, the LadyCoders site was attacked and taken down last night. Although we quickly had it back up, we experienced some serious trolling on Twitter, including some really awful porn and foul language. We're trying to stay positive and on message; this is about women who don't know how to get from skills to getting a job, not about us fighting solid inequity on ephemeral social media.  

We still need your help. We've got reach goals set; the first one is to reduce the price of all women's attendance at the seminar, and we will hit that at 30K. Help us help them, and thank you for your support. We're grateful, but we're also motivated, and we're going to stay motivated until we've actually done something about the gender inequity in coding. 

We'll see you at the finish line!

[ladycoders-blog]

We're almost at the end!

Kickstarter link

Just 6 hours to go to bring down the ticket costs to our seminar attendees!

If we can get to $30k, we will drop the cost for attendees by $50!  $50 may not seem like much to you, but that's a huge deal to someone trying to find work.

Help us start the mentorship cycle, we want to help as many people as we can!

[ladycoders-blog]

So women don't need help getting into the programming industry, huh? Our site, ladycoders.com, was attacked and taken down thirty minutes ago. We're not sure how, since we're not netsec; we're web devs. Ten minutes ago, Liz and I had the server booted, Apache restarted, and the site back up. Here's what we found on Twitter as we were working hard to get it back. 

We have 6k and 25 hours to go, and if I have to sit here and reboot Apache every ten minutes, I WILL keep Ladycoders.com up. 

Kickstarter link

UPDATE: We've removed one of the pix, since the person outed himself, apologized for miscommunicating, and seems like a genuinely decent person. 

[ladycoders-blog]

The seminar is also an interview bootcamp which mimics the actual experience of a multi-day tech interview.

How you can help: Please retweet or share a post about LadyCoders from someone online who is NOT us. It helps with social media spread. Posting in Reddit or on Digg or any other news aggregation site also works. 

Some people have asked what, precisely, we're doing. The question I've been asked today is this: "Are you guys filming a bunch of women coding? Why do I want to watch that?" What we are doing is putting 40 women through a technical interview bootcamp and filming the whole thing.

Here's the link to the seminar schedule itself: http://ladycoders.com/seminar-schedule/

You can see as you go through the seminar schedule sessions that we're starting with the first impression. Dress, makeup, presentation, gestures, handshaking, business card exchanges, greetings, and manners during a lunchtime interview date. Next, we're going to work on interview and personal documentation: resume formatting, your skillset presentation, and your personal brand. The first day rounds out with teaming up with others to brainstorm projects, being collegial, learning to handle cocktail functions (especially for women who do not drink), and some understanding of why the burden lies on women to communicate well. I will be reenacting real interviews with a former supervisor of mine to show women what works and doesn't--literally. I'm going to open up about some embarrassing missteps I've made so that these ladies won't do the same. There will also be individual short mock interviews to cover personal presentation and private feedback.

The second day jumps right into group programming exercises and project creation, interspersed with certifications, project ownership, networking and choosing ethical recruiters, how to handle being female on the job (motherhood and nursing, name changes, and more), and finishes up with a deliverable and meetings with over 10 real recruiters to get job placement and advice right then. 

This seminar is absolutely intended to be tiring. It's supposed to be mentally and personally exhilarating at the same time that it stretches the capacity of these ladies--and prepares them for the bloody exhausting process of multi-day round robin technical interviews with multiple teams. 

We're not doing these ladies any favors. We've been through interviews that kicked our...brains into high gear. By the time they're done, we'll have taught them more than any other women entering the tech job market knows about how to get a job, and we'll have filmed each talk, every exercise, and all the steps for the ladies who cannot attend.

THAT'S what we're doing, folks. 

[ladycoders-blog]

Are We Ready To See Tech Women Receive Interview Training and On-The-Job Mentorship? YOU Answer The Question.

There are eight days left in this Kickstarter campaign, we are 18% funded, and we may not succeed.  Kickstarter link

You. Yes, you. I am talking to you. I’m sitting behind my computer right now, looking at my stuffed Cthulhu, my Buffy statues, my undone todo list, Eclipse open in my task manager, and a stack of comic books I haven’t gotten to yet. You’re probably looking at much the same thing; your home at your computer. This is where we work, it’s where we play, and it’s where you and I want to see more women at home as well. I’m also looking at the numbers on our Kickstarter campaign. Frankly, these numbers are too low to succeed. We’re behind on backers if we want to put on our seminar and create our DVD to teach women how to make a successful transition from a computer science degree or some serious programming skills into a coding career.

Liz, Lorraine, and I have been thrilled to receive all the messages of support that we’ve gotten over the last three weeks. People everywhere are letting us know that they want to see women in programming, that they’re behind us, and that this is an admirable goal. It’s not translating fast enough into backers, however. If this Kickstarter campaign does not succeed, the seminar is canceled and the DVD will not be filmed.

We need your support and active effort if this campaign is to work. We need you to talk to your friends, to reach out to your journalist contacts to get stories running, and to be thought leaders. You can make a personal difference here, and we need you. Please, tell your friends that we need backers, and that they can make a huge difference in the lives of your sisters, friends, daughters, wives, mothers, and women everywhere who don’t know yet that a tech career can mean the freedom to run our lives, raise our children, establish independence, and soar to the top of our ambitions.

This is urgent: no one else is trying to provide mentorship to women in tech by putting on a seminar and filming a DVD to help women globally. We have 8 days to make this happen. Let’s pull together and see this through.

[ladycoders-blog]

Why Liz and Tarah have been quiet for a few days.

Help lead a woman into tech! Find a girl or woman in your life who always wanted to try programming, and suggest http://codeacademy.com to them. It's easy, intuitive, and they'll be programming JavaScript in minutes.

Hi, all; Tarah here.

Liz and I have been in Las Vegas at Def Con 2012 for the last six days. Def Con is the global hacker conv...errrr, oops. I mean, "Network And Security Information Technology Professional's Convention". As most of you know, Liz and I and Lorraine focus very heavily on web development and software architecture, and we needed to know more about information security. We learned so much that my brain is still spinning, and were deeply fortunate to be adopted by a great crew of hackers who taught us a profound amount. We've made lifelong friends, picked locks, hacked networks, decrypted puzzles, and generally increased our knowledge of information and network security by orders of magnitude. The unbelievably awesome Psychoholics, a team of big brains and bigger hearts (with a fair degree of puckish curiosity) were kind enough to bring us on board.

To make a long story short, we all won the Mystery Challenge, arguably the most difficult contest at Def Con. The Mystery Challenge includes cryptography, puzzles, language translations and puns, robot construction, and dozens of other problems which absolutely blew my mind. Among the highlights was Liz staying up all night on Saturday soldering circuitry and building a WORKING replica of Tom Servo, the gumball robot in Mystery Science Theater 3000. Attached, you can see me wearing my Def Con black badge (the prize given to the winners of the toughest contests, and which guarantees lifelong free entrance to all Def Cons) with the gentleman who created the Mystery Challenge and awarded our victory. His name is Ryan Clarke, and he's known as 1o57. You can also see Liz holding our trophy, a giant airline wrench. I could hardly lift it, but as you all know, Liz is a champion powerlifter, and proceeded to toss it around with enviable ease.

We had a great experience, and in a lot of ways, I think it helped us to remember why we are doing this Kickstarter: because every woman who loves math and science should be encouraged to use her brain to the fullest of her capacity. Also, because it was completely awesome. We're so grateful for this experience, and there is no doubt I'll be back next year.

[ladycoders-blog]

Campaign Update

Please consider corporate sponsorship of the LadyCoders seminar. If you have contacts in industry, please ask yourselves if there are any opportunities for us to partner with them, and after doing so, please feel free to give them my email:[email protected].

Our Kickstarter has started popping up on the strangest sites. I had no idea most of these places existed: Teknoids, Inagist, Mojoify, Kicktraq, and others. We're all learning a great deal about the Internet, but the most fascinating part is how many people we've met since the beginning of this campaign.

We've been in contact with hundreds of people all around the world, and found complementary projects and people who are deeply encouraging in spreading the word. The most exciting news we have is that we've had more than 1,000 shares on Facebook! 

We're pushing forward with other social media outlets, and have some of our first followers on our Tumblr as well. Liz knows more about Tumblr and Reddit than I do, so she tends to be the one who...well, tends to the Tumblr. I've been posting these updates on Facebook, and now on Tumblr. You can see us at ladycoders.tumblr.com! 

[ladycoders-blog]

We're taking this seriously, and we see you doing the same.

I've seen a Twittersplosion happen overnight. Hundreds of people have started tweeting about the project, with multiple opinions on everything from our name to the likelihood that we'll make a difference. See? We're an overnight success! Except--not really. Liz, Lorraine, and I have been treating this like our day jobs. We spend nine or ten hours a day tweeting, posting on Facebook, coming up with new strategies to spread the word, and emailing everyone we can think of. There's no such thing as an overnight success, and we know that because I just traced back the major explosion on Twitter to a few tweets that you sent out over the last two days. It was YOU who made that happen, and we are grateful. We're taking this seriously, and we know you are too. 

Boromir agrees with me, which makes me right.

How can you help?  It's the thoughtful, reasoned posts which explain a project that get attention and change hearts and minds. Please, contact an influential blogger that you know or write a blog/Tumblr/Facebook Note/post of your own and ask that your supporters take a look at our Kickstarter. http://kck.st/NdAsvp

[ladycoders-blog]

We've doubled our funding since yesterday. I can't even believe it!

You are incredible. I am stunned at the support we're seeing! We've DOUBLED our backer pledges on our Kickstarter! 

I have been asked again and again by you how you can help, and I am going to start providing you with specific ways you can join in. You've been inundating me with requests for how you can get the message out, and I am going to tell you how:

Tweet to @Kickstarter or post on the Kickstarter page to request that our project be featured. You can use this 135-character message anywhere: @kickstarter We want more women software developers to have interview training and mentorship! 166494057 is special: please feature it!

We want everyone to see powerful women running companies, mentoring girls who would otherwise have been on the doll-track and not the science-track, and inspiring college women to get into and stick with computer science. People need to know that we have something very special here, and that more women in technology means more women with the freedom to run their careers and families and lives the way they see fit. This is bigger than a single Kickstarter campaign, and everyone needs to know it. 

[ladycoders-blog]

Missing: Women in Tech

We think it’s awesome that an idea can go from concept to code to worldwide use with nothing more than a laptop and a bit of skill. With so many opportunities to be creative and financially independent in one of the few fields that is growing in a bad economy, why aren’t there more women involved in tech? The lack of women is startling, and we want to help add more skilled women to the technology workforce.

Women’s representation in the computing and information technology workforce has fallen over 25% from its peak of close to 40% in the mid-1980s.  We need your help to show women that the freedom, status, and independence of a solid, self-supporting technology career can be theirs. We want to be able to tell ladies that thousands of people have helped to fulfill their need for mentorship and want to see them succeed. We want to do more than just report the depressing lack of women in technology; we want to help change it!

No one is teaching qualified and skilled women how to talk to the managers running and hiring for tech teams, or how to handle motherhood when trying to get back into their career after taking a break - or trying to juggle work while nursing! You don't learn in college how to interview for tech teams; if you're lucky you get a generic class on how to interview in general.

How can we even begin to balance the scales?

We have learned the hard way how to project ourselves as skilled, competent, easy to work with, and an asset to even an all-male team of programmers. We’ve succeeded in getting jobs and even more offers at places like Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, and many startups, government agencies, and mid-sized companies.  We have identified and can teach the skills that have helped us land these projects.

Women lack mentorship at every single level of their information technology careers. We are three senior developers with a crazy number of combined years of experience. We are going to put on a training seminar to show women how using a base skill set can lead to a solid and worthwhile career in software and web development.