CodeNewbie

Courteney Ervin shares the ups and downs of building a product for one of the largest library systems in the world. Celia La walks us through the technical challenges (and solutions) of bringing Khan Academy's high quality content to people all over the world. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Integrated Library System Version Control System Memcached New York Public Library...

We wrap up our community talks with Sterling’s story of her very first project at her first dev job: making the app accessible for two blind students. Maurice kicks off our education talks with the story of Abacus, his side project that became the learning system used by thousands of students in his country of Belize. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) xkcd comic "Standards" J...

Valerie explores the importance of security in creating powerful and engaged communities, and breaks down three ways your code might be vulnerable. Rapi shares his story of creating a toy coding project in D3.js that sparked a movement and helped thousands of people become more politically engaged. Checkout the videos of these talks on the CodeNewbie YouTube channel. Show Links Partner with Dev &a...

This episode features two talks on mental health that explore two very different sides of this important topic. Michelle’s talk is a technical showcase of how her research project uses open source tools to better diagnose depression. Greg shares his personal struggles with ADHD and bipolar disorder, and how important it is for us to openly talk about mental health. Show Links Partner with Dev &amp...

When Minerva Tantoco was first offered the CTO position for New York City, she thought it was a prank. But in 2014, she became the city’s first Chief Technology Officer. She sits down with Codeland’s emcee, Nikhil Paul, to talk about how she started her long, impressive tech career, what programming looked like back her coding days, and how she hopes tech will transform cities for the better. Show...

Chris Algoo shares how he co-created “Breakup Squad,” the game where you have to keep two exes from getting back together. Kate Rabinowitz shows us how open data can help build powerful, insightful tools to better understand and improve your city. Eric Brelsford shares how he used mapping tools to help community members turn vacant lots into beautiful neighborhood spaces. Show Links Partner with D...

In our second episode of our Codeland miniseries, we dig into our talks on gaming and code. Jessica shows us how we can use failure to become better developers with lessons learned from the video gaming industry. Opher shows us a number of ways to use video game principles to make our web apps more exciting. To watch the videos of these talks, checkout our channel on YouTube. Show Links Partner wi...

In episode 1 of our Codeland miniseries, you get to hear two amazing talks on art and code. Stephanie's a first-time speaker from Amsterdam and shares her inspiring story of building her first hardware project. Dan shows us how creative coding can be with his amazing art and code showcase, featuring artists and installations of all shapes, sizes, and platforms. Show Links Partner with Dev & Co...

If you've heard of open data, big data, and data science and never quite knew what it was all about, this episode is for you. Briana helps us explore the different steps it takes to answer a complex data question with code, giving us a tour of the data science world along the way. We talk about the importance and difficulty of cleaning data, the role of ethics in data collection and analysis, and...

WordPress powers 27% of the web, with sites big and small leveraging the popular platform. Developer Ptah Dunbar, also known as “Pirate”, gives us a tour of the platform, its thriving community, and the realities of being employed as a WordPress developer. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Squarespace WordCamp Wix Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

In just over a year, Kim’s spoken at eight meetups, ten conferences, had talks accepted at three more, and has four upcoming talks already lined up. And she’s just getting started. She shares how presenting at meetups became an accidental launchpad for her speaking career at conferences, how she uses her past career in education to create unique tech talks, and how speaking has provided her incred...

This week, we followed up our conversation about embedded systems with a focus on getting into hardware as a whole. Elecia White gave us a tour of her hardware world, complete with stories of gadgets catching fire, the responsibility of creating life-saving ICU technology, and having fun with poopy robots. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Python Twilio Arduino Making Embedde...

Chris’s job sounds impressive. After over a decade working in tech, he’s designed microprocessors and now helps build robot vacuum cleaners. He’s at the intersection of hardware and software in a space called embedded systems. We explore this field, get a solid intro to working with chips, and discuss the many ways a codenewbie can start learning more about the fascinating world of embedded system...

When we talk about open source, we focus mostly on the code and contributions. But as a crucial element of the developer ecosystem, it’s important to think about the business side of things. How does it sustain itself? Is there money in open source? If there is, who gets it? Developer and open source maintainer Safia Abdalla helps us tackle these questions to better understand how open source real...

If you plan on getting a job as a developer, chances are, you’ll deal with the technical side of accepting online payments. It might be as easy as plugging in a tool like Stripe or Braintree, but it can quickly get complicated. In this more technical episode, Noel takes us through some of those thorny situations and how a newbie can navigate the complex world of money. Show Links Partner with Dev...

Jo Overline’s created 30 apps, totally 30 million downloads over the past ten years. He’s taken his success as an app creator and built a business around it, launching a consultancy that helps individuals and businesses build successful products. He shares his lessons learned in created successful apps, his thoughts on how apps have evolved over the years, and whether or not there’s still room for...

The dream is to learn to code for a few months and get a job right away. But reality comes with a few more twists and turns, as Paola discovered on her way to landing her current software engineering position at BuzzFeed. She was an assitant looking for a better career when she rediscovered code. But getting that better careeer involved attending two bootcamps, doing an internship, and job searchi...

Rapi wasn’t very politically engaged until his husband told him about Bernie Sanders, and soon after, Rapi was hooked. He joined the Coders for Sanders group and created the Bernie Map, an open source project that would become valuable for future movements. Rapi shares how he transferred the energy from the Coders for Sanders community to create the Progressive Coders Network, how he thinks about...

When Evan read an article about the rate of suicide among veterans returning from war, it broke his heart. So he decided to turn that heart break into advocacy. He read about and researched the experiences of vets and created a game designed to share theirs stories with the world. Evan tells us about his process, why games have a special power to create empathy and activate, and what he hopes for...

Ray Acevedo was a mechanic, a full-time job he held while he learned to code part-time at the Coalition for Queens. In this specially produced segment, Ray shares his coding journey, how he came close to quitting altogether, how his brother got him through, and how being a mechanic helped him learned to code. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Coalition for Queens Access Code...

Mary became a programmer in the late 1960s, back when coding was “barbaric,” as she put it. She takes us through her nearly 40 years of working with computers, starting with the era of punch cards. She shares the joy of using a terminal for the first time, her determination to stay technical even as she climbed the corporate ladder, and how the tools of coding have shifted the programmer’s job des...

Shubheksha shares her experience contributing to open source, why it took her two years to contribute in a meaningful way, and how working on open source has boosted her confidence and sharpened her skills. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) CS50 Mozilla IRC Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

Before becoming a developer, Laura had a number of job titles, including music blogger, DJ, and maid. But it was a Rails Girls workshop that brought her back to the world of web that she fell in love with many years ago. Now, as a manger at the Travis Foundation, she gets to help introduce other women to tech through the Rails Girls Summer of Code, one of the many initiatives she runs. She tells u...

Bill Sourour was twenty-one when he was asked to build a website for a pharmaceutical company. It was a quiz that asked users to select symptoms so that it could recommend a drug as a possible solution. But for almost every option the user selected, the quiz would recommend the same drug. It didn’t feel right, but when Bill later heard that a side effect of the drug was depression and a young woma...

If you’re hoping to get your first tech job and you haven’t heard of TechHire, this episode is for you. We talk to Tess, the managing director of TechHire, about working with employer and learning partners to place 100K people in tech jobs by 2020. She talks about the realities of finding a job in tech at the salary you want, what technology’s increasing demand for talent means for job seekers, an...