Girl Develop It

Last night I volunteered at the Philadelphia chapter of Girl Develop It. GDI offers low-cost programming classes for women. One of my former co-workers who’s involved with GDI shared that they were looking for an extra TA, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet people in the local tech world and to hang out for a couple hours near the edge of my comfort zone.

The meetup I was TA-ing was Intro to the Command Line. I feel proficient enough at the command line (since I use RedHawk Linux every day at work) that I thought I’d be useful as a TA.

The class was a little over two hours. From the meetup description:

In this course, we will cover the basics of using a terminal to control *nix operating systems. In addition, you will also learn how to use it to manipulate such things as the filesystem, the built-in help commands, file contents, program I/O, and remote systems.

I answered the participants’ questions and enjoyed helping out. I’d probably go back if they asked me or if there were another class for which I felt particularly apt to volunteer. None of my close friends are computery, so it was nice meeting people outside of work who are interested in software development.

It was also refreshing to see women wanting to learn how to program. I don’t view women being underrepresented in STEM fields as a problem, as long as it’s by choice, but at the same time I’m kind of biased in thinking that software development is cool and girls might be missing out. I like what GDI is doing. The meetups are affordable (< $15/hr), and one can take the classes à la carte. If GDI is teaching people who otherwise wouldn’t have an affordable/comfortable/accessible forum to learn about development, well, that’s pretty nice.