"The scene at Level 39 is completely different"

Guest post by Joysy John, advisor at Level 39 and supporter of education initiatives that get more people to learn coding.

It was exciting to host the first cohort of 33 Code First Girls at Level 39! When I studied computer engineering back in the 90's in Singapore I was one of the few women in a class full of men. 


The scene at Level 39 is totally different. It is a class full of women learning to code over the summer. Over 9 weeks these women are learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Sinatra, Ruby, mongoDB, Rails, Github, Heroku and building some interesting projects. The classes are taught by Tom Close, an Oxford PhD in Quantum Information Processing. I was asked to teach one of the classes. I was thrilled as I am passionate about education and getting more women to code!

I taught the class on database design. I really enjoyed teaching the basic concepts of data modelling, normalisation and relational databases. Programming with the latest web technologies like Ruby on Rails is so much easier than programming with C or C++. Even though the programming languages being taught were new to me, the fundamental logic of algorithms and data structures remain the same. For example once you understand the concept behind arrays and hashes it doesn't matter whether you are programming in Python, Ruby on Rails or something else.

The women on the Code First Girls programme have been exposed to a lot of different programming languages and technologies. They are definitely more confident about creating their own website now than when they started the program. I wish there were more initiatives like this that demystify coding and inspire young women to enter technical roles in startups and in corporates.

Initiatives like Code Club, Apps for Good, Decoded Edu are a great first step towards inspiring primary school kids to learn coding. I look forward to a world where we will have more female role models in tech.

Congratulations to Code First Girls for launching this initiative to groom our future role models!

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