Hackbright Academy

What Is It Like To Participate In Hackbright Academy?

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 22:26:54 -0400

Zoe Kay, Programmer, baker, quilter, traveler, hopeful trapeze artist

This post originally appeared on Forbes via Quora by Zoe Kay.

I was a participant in the summer 2012 (first) session. The short answer is: with a lot of studying and persistence, you’ll learn more than you thought and have a lot of fun.

The long answer: I had done a few months ofCodecademy.com before I found Hackbright, but felt rather stuck trying to study on my own. When I found the program, I planned to continue studying on my own if I didn’t get in/enroll. I am so glad Hackbright worked out. There were twelve women accepted. We were all asked to do Learn Python the Hard Way or an equivalent on other sites before the first day.

The first five weeks were almost all pair-programming all the time, which was really helpful for problem-solving and learning Python syntax, processes, etc. Those five weeks were focused on getting comfortable with Python and programming concepts with increasingly more complex exercises – make a calculator, make a pig latin translator, make a to-do list application with Flask, make a movie-ratings prediction app with Flask. We covered concepts like Big O Notation and binary trees. We usually had a morning meeting and post-lunch meeting, covering what we were going to do that day and recapping. On top of this, we had a lot of awesome speakers (Leah Culver, Zed Shaw, and many startup founders) that gave us a sense of what we’d be doing and what to expect as a junior dev. There was a lot of encouragement to get involved with hackathons and local tech groups.

The second five weeks were spent on personal projects – two women chose to pair while everyone else did an individual project. We were strongly encouraged to come up with our own idea, ran them by our teacher, and he gave us some suggested starting points. We worked a lot on our own the second five weeks, and it was more freeform, but we still had morning meetings and had impromptu learning sessions as a group. We also focused more on technical interview questions (whiteboarding) and had an interview day with companies interested in hiring.

That is the “basic” overview … the two guys running Hackbright (David and Christian) worked incredibly hard for our benefit and genuinely want us all to succeed. Our group became great friends and plans to stay in touch. If you are wondering about job readiness, a few people in our class have already gotten job offers, and others are in the process.

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Hackbright Academy & Girl Geek Dinners Present Dinner #23

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:17:01 -0400

We are so excited to be presenting Dinner #23 with Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in San Francisco! It’s going to be a blast! Be sure to register today at 10AM sharp :) #hbggd

Our Very First Hack Night!

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:53:40 -0400

We are hosting our very first hack night!

Come on in with your laptop and a project to work on, or help someone else with theirs. Beginners are encouraged to join us. We’re looking forward to a fun night full of Python, hacking, socializing, and learning! Drinks and snacks will be provided.

Space is limited so register here: http://bit.ly/OcWwTe

Use the call box and dial #302 and we’ll buzz you in - we are on the 3rd floor (through the Samasource doors, we’re the first door on the left). See you there!

*We are encouraging all ladies to attend, and men are also welcome!

hungry for life: Survival Guide to Your First Hackathon

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:42:06 -0400

hungry for life: Survival Guide to Your First Hackathon :

michellelsun:

Last weekend, I attended my first ever hackathon and with minimal expectation, had a blast out of it and learned loads. My team did not win, nor did most of us slept at the event, but everyone got a lot out of it.

The Hackathon, DevelopHer, was organized by LinkedIn, claimed to be the…

hungry for life: Four Hacks to Learning to be a Hacker - "A Python Ate Me!" And Other Muses from Week 2

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:51:28 -0400

hungry for life: Four Hacks to Learning to be a Hacker - "A Python Ate Me!" And Other Muses from Week 2:

michellelsun:

It’s officially the beginning of my third week at Hackbright working on Python. There has been ups and downs, some days (and nights) of pure nightmares, literally (quoting one of my classmates, “I dreamed that a python ate me last night”!), and some days of awesome state of “flow”, when…

Learning Python with Hackbright Academy: Background

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 04:28:12 -0400

Learning Python with Hackbright Academy: Background:

letslearnpython:

22, recent transplant to the Bay area, aspiring developer.

As a child, I read field guides and documented insects. Until recently, I made my living as a model and a lightweight graphic designer.

I had always considered myself ‘tech-savvy’, as most of my generation does, but it wasn’t until…

always hungry: 3 Learnings From My Past Year in Tech Startups

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 04:19:33 -0400

always hungry: 3 Learnings From My Past Year in Tech Startups :

michellelsun:

Last year, I left the financial industry to join the world of startups. A year flew by, I have developed a new sense of belonging and responsibility to this community, drawing me more closely to this industry that I’ve long been fascinated with.

Having worked in a startup and founded one, I’m now at crossroads on next steps and taking this vantage point for reflection. A few things have helped me tremendously in my journey in the past year.

Learning Python with Hackbright Academy: Day 0

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Learning Python with Hackbright Academy: Day 0:

letslearnpython:

As Christian instructed, we all arrive before 10 - most of us earlier. There’s a tangible feeling of anxiety and eagerness in the room. For about an hour, we socialize and enjoy a pre-prepared breakfast. I immediately like everyone in our diverse(excepting gender) group - 11 other bright women…

Debugging The Problem Of Women In Tech

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:08:02 -0400

As I had grown into the role of technical lead in an engineering organization, I found that I spent significantly less time programming, and more time debugging other people’s problems. Oddly enough, this doesn’t involve protracted hours poring over code; most of the time problems can be solved by having someone ask the obvious questions. Here’s an example.

Engineeer: We have a problem! The server won’t talk to the database! I tried rolling back to an older API and everything!

Me: Is the database machine up?

Engineer: Yes.

Me: Is the database service running?

Engineer: Yes.

Me: Are the servers visible to each other on the network?

Engineer: No.

Me: Is the database visible to any other machine on the network?

Engineer: No.

Me: Is… the network cable plugged in?

Engineer: Uhh…

And so it goes.

Now I’m an educator, specifically trying to solve the problem of the lack of women in tech. Even though the nature of the problem is about as different as it gets, I resorted to my standard bag of tricks and started with the obvious questions.

Just how many women are there in tech?

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of developers are women. This number seems to be lower in the Silicon Valley, observationally, it seems closer to one in ten.

At the college level, some universities have instituted a policy of having a 50% ratio of women to men entering computer science, but high attrition brings the number down between 10 and 20% for graduates. Interestingly, this is particular to US universities. The University of Malaysia, for example, manages to maintain parity from acceptance to graduation.

Why are the attrition rates so high?

Ultimately, it’s a social problem. A study at UPenn found that women were entering the CS major with an inadequate background. This is a natural side-effect of relaxing admission requirements to increase the ratio, and resulted in students struggling to perform as well as their peers. Compounded with a general perception that men knew more about the subject, women lost confidence, and subsequently, interest in pursuing a computer science degree.

Anecdotes collected from women I worked and went to school with affirm the study, but in a less clinical tone. The common theme in these stories was that they were intimidated by entering a male-dominated field where the prevailing attitude asserts that women are somehow innately less skilled than men. Some women went as far as saying that the environment was hostile. Men were openly competitive about their knowledge mastery, and more than one woman told me they felt they were being judged as being representative of all women.

It’s no wonder there are so few women in tech.

Can anything be done?

On the face of it, it seems high school educators could do more to ensure that women are well-prepared to enter computer science programs when they reach college. Naturally, the next obvious question is, why aren’t they already when so many men are? To be perfectly honest, I have no insight into the problem at that level. Furthermore, high school curriculums are so wildly divergent I doubt that a systematic, global solution can be found.

The anecdotes I collected suggest that a college equivalent of HR harassment training could do much to reduce the attrition rate. That seems even less likely to become reality than high school standardization.

Without a massive social shift (which I believe will occur naturally, gradually), I don’t think anything can be done to improve the numbers of university-level computer science programs.

Wait… is university-level CS required to enter the tech industry?

Ten years ago, I would have said yes, with a few notable exceptions. Now, the answer is a firm no. Tech has rapidly evolved since the first Internet bubble. Gone are the days of attempting to eke out every last drop of performance from a user’s computer, which required an almost-obsessive attention to details and an encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms, things which fall squarely in the province of computer science.

With the rise of web 2.0 and social networking, most problems in tech involve moving huge swaths of data over vast networks, orchestrating and integrating countless components to enable this data manipulation. Universities are only just realizing this, and few if any have updated their curriculums accordingly.

So what does this all mean for women in tech?

The fact that computer science is ill-suited in preparing new engineers to enter the workforce opened the door for so-called ‘hacker academies’ to pick up the slack. Hacker School in New York, Code Academy in Chicago, and now Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco have all seen promising early success in teaching the skills necessary for modern software engineering in a short time frame.

From there, it was a short hop to start a course that builds on those successes while simultaneously aiming to eliminate the social problems that drive women out of traditional computer science programs in the first place. Thus was born Hackstar Academy, an accelerated engineering training program exclusively for women. In a very real sense, we’re brute-forcing the problem: we’re increasing the number of women in tech by training and placing women in entry-level tech positions.

I believe that we’ll eventually make the social changes necessary to make our program obsolete. I look forward to the day that women no longer feel intimidated pursuing technical degrees. It seems inevitable, and until then, we’ll keep doing our part to urge these changes along.

On learning to code (and Hackstar Academy)

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:09:00 -0400

This is a guest blog post from Janine Yoong. She is the VP of Business Development at TokBox. She works with partners who use the OpenTok API to add video chat to their apps. Prior to TokBox Janine worked at Google on strategic partnerships in the local space. She is also an advisor to Hackstar Academy. Follow her on twitter @janineyoong.

My first month at TokBox I told a friend how I was struggling to get people to build stuff with the API when I couldn’t do it myself. She handwaved: that’s not your job. You’re not an engineer; spend time doing what you were hired for, not waste time trying to be more technical.

I don’t think this point of view is entirely wrongheaded. I did end up learning to do things piece-meal - making simple demos and sales tools, building a downtime SMS notification prototype, trying to debug customers’ code - but sometimes it occurred to me that the time I spent doing stuff like that at my glacial pace (vs begging a dev for 15 minutes of help) could have been better spent calling customers. Or when demos failed or when I answered questions badly that it would have been better for me to leave that to people who knew what they were doing. But I kept dabbling, mostly for fun and a change of pace.

That’s basically how David and Christian found me 6 weeks ago - a dabbler. I had read Dive Into Python and Learn Rails by Examplecover to cover at some point and whoop-assed all the exercises. Turns out that doesn’t mean much; I couldn’t build things, or truly grasp how to get from for loops to web apps. With Rails, it was a piece of cake to get apps up and running, but I still didn’t really get how it all worked under the covers and couldn’t confidently build my own thing outside of the Example.

So I was stoked to beta test David and Christian’s plans for Hackstar Academy. I didn’t have ten 10-hour-day weeks to devote to it, but was incredibly grateful to them for working with the nights and weekends I could spare. A few things worked really, really well -

Christian is an awesome teacher. I’ve found most developers extremely kind about helping noobs, but not always able to relate to why basic concepts seem foreign. Christian is not only all patience and no condescension, but is gifted at explaining clearly how things work, all the way down to brass tacks.
Dive-in headfirst approach. We took a quick leap from exercises to a project that Christian and David helped me pick. The project was personal enough for me to get excited about, broad enough for me to learn general concepts to reuse, and scoped enough for me to get it done.
Pairing. This is a big one - when I look back on my earlier trysts with Python, I figure that the reason why I struggled was because I was doing it on my own. Working closely with some one else helped me talk through stuff I didn’t get and be more disciplined about best practices.

If I didn’t take away as much as I could, it was mostly related to my cheating, i.e. stealing a couple of hours here and there doesn’t really add up to the immersive experience HackStar Academy will offer. In any case, six weeks later and probably only about 12 hours total of real time, I now have a pet project I’m pretty proud of. Can’t call myself a developer, but I’m confident about being able to prototype another idea if I wanted to - at least I’d know where to start and what to Google for if I get stuck.

The tech community has been abuzz about learning to code for awhile now; while I doubt anyone thinks it’s a bad thing in principle, there’ve been mumblings around the dangers of “anyone can code” rhetoric and what kind of “developers” actually come out of programs like this. I think it’s like anything else - not everyone is a chef, butanyone can cook. It’s naive to expect that people coming out of HackStar Academy (or Code Academy, or Dev Bootcamp) will be able to go toe-to-toe with seasoned engineers out the gate. But I believe they’ll have the tools to get started on a path in engineering, or build proof of concepts without looking for a technical co-founder, or simply be better at their non-technical tech job (like mine) by being technical anyway. That kind of the empowerment is awesome.

The dave-to-girl ratio isn’t something that keeps me up at night. But that some women feel held back because of it is something I hope we as an industry can address, not by launching a thousand outraged op-eds, but by empowering women with confidence. A few months ago, I made a hack at Music Hack Day and presented it from localhost. I didn’t push it live because I was too pained to have anyone look at how ugly the code was, when the other 200 people were making things like Kinect beatboxes and soundwave mustaches. Music Hack Day is the most inviting, least judgmental community of hackers, and being a dude wouldn’t have made me feel differently. But I wish I had then what I’ve gotten out of my time with David and Christian: a little more skill and a lot more confidence. That’s what I’d wish for any woman who feels outnumbered or outmatched.

I’m impressed by David and Christian’s vision of empowering women to pursue their passions and am excited to be involved in HackStar Academy. I can’t wait to see the results in ten weeks, and will be keeping an eye out for hires for my team at TokBox.