Funny enough, I first heard about the free Boston Python workshop for women from Tuan Pham. While this particular workshop of theirs is geared towards women, men are welcome as guests of female attendees (he snuck in with Abby Fitchner… heh). I’ve been trying to wrap my head around programming by using sites like Code Academy, not to become a coder myself ( I heard somewhere that “learning to code” is the new “I’m writing a novel”) but to understand everything a little bit better. Startup life has made me slightly insatiable and ever since Vsnap CTO Claudia started me on mocking user interface design (a lil out if my comfort zone as a community manager), I’ve had an interest in everything that makes up a website. Vsnap runs on Groovy/Grails, but I couldn’t turn down a free programming workshop even if it was Python. I also couldn’t turn down free pizza. 

The workshop was this past Friday night and all day Saturday at the Stata Center (MIT). It was led by Jessica McKellar along with a slew of volunteers from Google, Oracle, and grad students from BU and MIT. I really dug the helpful vibe and the general feeling that knowledge is power and learning to code will help you change the world. :) I’ll fully admit, having no coding experience, there were a few times where I got lost, but nonetheless, I think it was a great foundation for Python. 

On Friday night we began our journey with a very well documented, self-guided tutorial. If we had any hiccups, there were plenty of volunteers to go around. At the end of the night (about 2 hours worth of work), we had a quick “quiz”/check out with one of the volunteers. I did fairly well and breezed through most of the exercises since a lot of the tutorial was repetitive (in a great way) and easy to follow. The less guided portion on CodingBat, online code practice for Java and Python, was a little more daunting. 

On Saturday we got to play with WordPlay, ColorWall, or Twitter. 

Playing with ColorWall was fun and I caught on quick. I even changed the code for ColorWall to have it flash and match the colors of my outfit. I swear I’m not that girly, but it was pretty cool to do. 

Next up was Twitter. If Abby and I had known that we’d be tapping into the Twitter API on the big screen,  we might have stopped tweeting with the hashtag. (Well, no… #lies)

Some of the volunteers did a few demos of things they’ve worked on, but I don’t have pictures to display. :/ It was great to see how Python works in everything from games to graphs that put Excel to shame.

To wrap it all up, Jessica sent an awesome follow up today, encouraging us to practice practice practice and to attend events. Some helpful next steps included (copying this part straight from the email):

My brain is still kind of melty, but I’m really glad I went to the event. Thank you to all the volunteers that gave up their Friday and Saturday to teach us n00bs! Special thanks to Abby who walked me through a bunch of it (and who was a fellow attendee). More thanks to The Python Foundation for sponsoring! Stay tuned to the Boston Python Meetup page (or follow them on Twitter @BostonPython), they do a free workshop every couple months and their next project night (all levels) is January 10th at Microsoft New England.