Ladies Learning Code Winnipeg
Saturday instead of sleeping in and eating croissants (as I usually do on a Saturday) I spent my morning brushing up on my HTML and CSS skills at the "CSS for Beginners" class held by the Winnipeg chapter of Ladies Learning Code, a nonprofit that promotes digital literacy for women and youth.
While I'm pretty well-versed with a lot of digital tools, front-end development isn't somewhere that I've really spent a lot of time sinking my teeth into, though some of you longtime readers might remember my brief stint with CodeAcademy last year where I made this masterpiece:
Shortly thereafter life started to really ramp up in other ways, so CodeAcademy sort of fell by the wayside. As such, I was really excited to be able to have another opportunity to spend some time getting to know what actually goes into making a website look (and operate) fabulously.
I spent the day cramming tons of information about style sheets, rule sets, declarations, values, elements, and tons of other topics into my eager little brain along with a packed classroom full of other lady-learners.
At one point we went around the room and introduced ourselves and briefly discussed our motivations for attending, and it was amazing to see all these women, many from extremely different walks of life, coming together to learn something completely new together.
Our instructor, Brad, was knowledgable and peppered the informational slides with silly gifs that lightened the mood when we were tackling a difficult concept, and there were plenty of mentors who were not only super-clever, but also displayed more patience with cleaning up our messy code than I ever thought a person could have.
If there's anything that I've taken away from that experience it's that coding takes a lot of patience. Suddenly I have way more respect for John's day job, eek!
Overall it was a really positive and informative experience, and it's encouraged me to start exploring the ways in which being able to have a better understanding of different coding languages can help me provide better services for my clients.
Big thanks to Michelle and Jessica from Ladies Learning Code for putting together such a great day, and for inviting me to participate!
