{"id":24,"date":"2014-07-17T20:02:16","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T20:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/?p=24"},"modified":"2014-11-18T18:33:21","modified_gmt":"2014-11-18T18:33:21","slug":"girl-develop-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/2014\/07\/17\/girl-develop-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Girl Develop It"},"content":{"rendered":"

While moving ahead with our Treehouse tutorials, Jenifer and Jackie each signed up for in-person workshops through Philly’s Girl Develop IT. Girl Develop It<\/a>\u00a0is a international organization with chapters in most major American cities that offers hands-on instruction for women who want to learn web and software development. Jackie\u00a0attended\u00a0an amazing day-long workshop on user experience<\/a>\u00a0back in the Spring and was excited to see workshops cropping up on\u00a0the same coding skills we were working through in Treehouse.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
GDIT’s PSD to HTML day at the Impact Hub<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In May, Jenifer attended Girl Develop IT’s “PSD to HTML” project day<\/a> at Philadelphia’s Impact Hub<\/a>.\u00a0 The workshop started with a Photoshop image of a web site design mocked up by a client.\u00a0 This was a real world scenario – an actual small business website idea that was presented to the web developer for realization. \u00a0Attendees\u00a0spent the afternoon using the Photoshop file, css, and html to code the site, learning along the way the many challenges of taking this approach.\u00a0 PSD to HTML had apparently been a common workflow in the past – especially at the time when many image effects weren’t yet possible through CSS or across browsers- but has more recently faded from the forefront while mobile-first, responsive design approaches have taken prominence.\u00a0 Treehouse.com takes that position<\/a>, but reminds that detailed Photoshop mockups are still essential as a tool for working with clients and when working in large teams. \u00a0Jenifer’s experience at the workshop was that she was able to successfully realize far more of the site using my knowledge gained from a few weeks of tutorials than expected.\u00a0 The support from the GDIT instructors was great but also revealed the challenge of keeping up with the latest and working across multiple areas of habit and specialization.\u00a0 One instructor would advise on solving a problem in a way informed by her experience working with SASS (a css preprocessor) and another comes along and suggests a solution informed by her work with another framework or grid system like Bootstrap.\u00a0 In that sense, it was a little like trying to learn a language from a group of teachers who each speak a different dialect.\u00a0 But it was also a good illustration of the remarkable versatility of CSS.\u00a0 Overall, it was a great experience and Jenifer intends to participate in more GDIT events in the future.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
JavaScript for Beginners<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In July, Jackie attended a two-week JavaScript for Beginners<\/a> class at Indy Hall <\/a>to supplement the\u00a0Treehouse track\u00a0in front-end web development. The class was targeted at beginners who had a solid knowledge of HTML and CSS, but knew little about JavaScript. The instructor\u00a0started by introducing the fundamentals of JavaScript and instructing students on how to create\u00a0some very basic page interactions. Each session built on the previous and\u00a0ended with a session on the JQuery library.\u00a0This class was Jackie’s\u00a0first real experience with any programming language (she’d incorporated scripts into websites before, but had never written any JavaScript on her\u00a0own). It was challenging, and she was surprised at how little previous\u00a0knowledge of HTML\/CSS help with understanding the underlying principles of programming. At GDI, though, there was support throughout the sessions from the instructor as well as 3-4 helpers assisting attendees. Learning a programming language like JavaScript is an endeavor that will take time and practice. Working through the JavaScript tutorials in Codecademy <\/a>after the class was a helpful refresher for the basics of the GDI class. All in all, taking a class with GDI is highly recommended (men are welcome too!).<\/p>\n

\"Girl<\/a>
And you even get a cool sticker to take home!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While moving ahead with our Treehouse tutorials, Jenifer and Jackie each signed up for in-person workshops through Philly’s Girl Develop IT. Girl Develop It\u00a0is a international organization with chapters in most major American cities that offers hands-on instruction for women who want to learn web and software development. Jackie\u00a0attended\u00a0an amazing day-long workshop on user experience\u00a0back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":605,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-tools"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/605"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/coderascals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}