CodeNewbie

Chanelle Henry wanted to be awesome. She saw people building inspiring products and wondered if it was too late for her to be that awesome. That question inspired a Medium blog post that ended up getting her invites to speak on that very topic.

Annyce Davis became an Android developer by building an Android app. She took some time to hack away at a prototype, showed it to her boss, and was put in charge of building The Washington Posts’s first Android app.

Mariana Costa started Laboratoria to help young women in Lima, Peru get coding skills and improve their lives. A year and a half in, she’s launched this five-month program serving low-income women in four cities, and she’s just getting started.

Dan Shiffman doesn’t like titles. As an open source contributor, author, and professor, it might be because he has so many to pick from. In this episode, we touch on all three, focusing on his work with Processing and why he loves working with beginners.

Rebecca Miller Webster created Write Speak Code for herself. She wanted a space that would encourage her to write more, speak more, and contribute to open source more. And in the process of creating that space for others, she grew herself.

He’s only been coding for four years. But thirteen months ago, Quincy Larson launched one of the most beloved learn-to-code resources in the CodeNewbie community, Free Code Camp.

Linda Liukas identifies more with being a children’s author than a developer. She used to work for Codecademy, started Rails Girls, and most recently wrote, Hello Ruby, a book introducing programming to children.

Brianna tells us how she switched from being pre-med to computer science, and got over the intimidation of sitting next to kids who’d discovered coding long before she knew what programming was all about.

When she goes to events, she no longer writes her own name on her name tag. Instead, she writes “Brianna’s Mother”. Ronique, the proud single-mother of a coder talks to us about how she supports and advocates for her daughter, and what it’s been like to see her only child take advantage of the many tech opportunities she’s come by. Brianna tells us how she switched from being pre-med to computer science, and got over the intimidation of sitting next to kids who’d discovered coding long before she knew what programming was all about. She tells us her inspiring stories of working at the White House under US CTO Megan Smith, and coding alongside Googlers, all as a college undergrad.

Software Engineer Alicia Liu has thought a lot about Impostor Syndrome. In fact, she’s written three blog posts, one each year for the past three years, that have illustrated her own relationship with the term and its relevance in the tech community.