Tagged: New Media Manitoba
Ladies Learning Code Winnipeg
- by Alyson Shane
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!
Hi Thursday
- by Alyson Shane
Woke up feeling like a million bucks. I’ve been reading A Tale of Two Cities before bed and it’s been nice to be delving back into some fiction on my own time. John and I snuggled extra hard this morning and after wolfing back some eggs and a cup of coffee I booked it to the bus. Originally I thought I’d hate using transit for my commute but it’s been giving me a lot of time to think and mentally organize my plans for the day.
This song came on my Songza playlist while I was en route to the office. Love it.
John’s company, The Campfire Union, was featured in this spiffy video about the future of virtual reality that New Media Manitoba put together. It’s so exciting to be surrounded by such positive and driven people!
The weekend is here and this is basically all I want to do:
(Okay, maybe not alone. But you get the idea)
New Media Manitoba's #NMMparty14 event
- by Alyson Shane
Tuesday night I spent in the evening in the company of some of Winnipeg's finest entrepreneurs and tech-savvy folks at the New Media Manitoba holiday party. It was held at The Met, which is one of my favourite (absolutely gorgeous) venues.
One of the highlights of the evening was a series of little videos showcasing some great local tech companies, including Visual Lizard, Bold Commerce, Dash Agency and my dear friends at The Campfire Union.
(Les totally killed it, by the way. Well done!)
The video was put together by Handcraft Creative, who totally outdid themselves - it was a seriously professional and impressive piece.
The Campfire VR demo setup of Yana Virtual Relaxation was also a huge hit. I've hung out on Dagat Beach a few times and it's so immersive! Here's local Twitter megastar Ben Rogers giving it a whirl: 
Thanks again to New Media Manitoba for hosting such a spectacular event, and for providing me with an opportunity to gorge on tiny snacks, free popcorn and white wine. Yummmm!
