Photographer: Mary Beth Koeth (http://www.mbkoeth.com/)
By Greyceli Marin
Ironhack coding school, an intensive web development and UX/UI design bootcamp, hosted its first multi-day coding workshop for women only, We/Code: Women’s Weekend. It was dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of front-end web development, guiding the attendees through building their own personal web pages from scratch.
To participate, women had to submit written applications answering the question, How will knowing the fundamentals of web development improve your professional profile? After reviewing over 130 applicants, 50 were carefully selected to attend free of charge. The lectures were helmed by Ironhack’s Head of Product, who also built the curriculum for the school’s new Front-End Web Development bootcamp.
On Saturday morning, 50 enthusiastic women made their way to Ironhack Miami’s campus inside Building.co, a collaborative workspace in Brickell where they were greeted by complimentary breakfast. Day 1 began with an introduction to HTML and CSS, their syntax and how the languages worked together on a website. Everyone was asked to download a text editor they would use to build their sites, and then went straight to coding.
The instructor coded along with the class, with his laptop connected to the big projector in front of the room. As the group built, seven assistants, ladies who were either Ironhack alumni or current students in the front-end course, were available throughout the weekend to help out.
Most of the women participating had never touched a line of code before and most of them came from non-technical backgrounds. There were entrepreneurs, project managers, designers, marketers, educators and even a 14-year-old about to enter her freshman year of high school. They all successfully built customized resume web pages using HTML and CSS.
Day 2 concluded with finishing touches on the web pages and three workshops led by industry leaders. The workshops were 30 minute presentations on how having basic coding knowledge helped them succeed in their non-technical roles, with a Q&A session at the end. Speakers included Linda Koritkoski, director of marketing at STRAAT, where her HTML and CSS competency comes in handy when prototyping, building SEO and communicating with her developer team; Alexandra Floresmeyer, lead designer at Liveanswer who works closely with web developers and says that understanding web languages helps her create more feasible designs; and Marsha Belinson, managing director at JBCConnect (and a participant in the event) who gave best practices on recruiting, interviewing and working with developers.
The weekend was a direct successor of its namesake, We/Code, Europe’s largest intro-to-coding event launched by Ironhack’s Spain Campuses in collaboration with Google for Entrepreneurs’ Campus Madrid. For more information about Ironhack and future events, visit https://www.ironhack.com/en.