Girls Develop and They're Damn Good at It!

Girls Develop, and they know what they are doing. What does this mean?

Jscrambler has been supporting JavaScript-focused communities worldwide for a while now. This time, we would love to share our sponsorship experience with Girl Develop It, a non-profit organization supporting women's inclusion in the web development world.

So, Why Sponsoring?

Sponsoring meetups and events is a great way to foster knowledge sharing within communities. In our case, it helps us bring security-related subjects to discussion and share our experience in the JavaScript Security field.

It is an opportunity to get valuable feedback regarding our product – it helps us align our strategy and improve the quality of our service.

Women in Tech

“If 90% of coders are men, developing and owning the language of the future, women won’t be part of the conversation.” Caitlin Moran.

From the collective rights standpoint, women are still perceived as a social minority when it comes to programming.

Not to mention that, according to CNET, the percentage of women working in major tech companies is 30% while the power of strategic decision-making is rarely in the hands of women.
As social equality and coding education still have a long way to go, we were thrilled to come across Girl Develop It (GDI), a non-profit organization “that exists to provide affordable and judgment-free opportunities for women interested in learning web and software development.”

Vanessa Hurst and Sara Chipps founded GDI in 2010 in NYC to address the issue of gender inequality in tech. Since then the organization has grown and it currently has its presence in over 50 cities across the US with over 55,000 members nationwide.

Under the vision of “creating a network of empowered women who feel confident in their abilities to code and build beautiful web and mobile applications”, GDI provides affordable programming classes for all women who aspire to learn web and software development.

In terms of content taught, GDI courses cover a wide range of technical topics from HTML + CSS (parts I and II), JavaScript, Intro to Git & Github, Web Accessibility, Intro to Angular.js, PHP, and content strategy and SEO.

The classes are open to all adults over 18, and the price ranges from free to around $80. The class curricula are open source; they are created by experts in respective topics, vetted by the GDI community, and can be accessed on the GDI official website.

In keeping with Jscrambler’s area of expertise and activity and our conviction that JavaScript is the past, present, and future of web programming/development, we were happy to support the JavaScript classes organized by the Raleigh-Durham chapter of GDI (GDIRDU) in North Carolina.

The “Javascript Basics for Beginners” courses sponsored by Jscrambler were run in Raleigh and Durham as a 4-week series, each attended by about 25 women. The classes were taught by JavaScript professionals from companies such as Adwerx and Amplify.

GDI students wearing Jscrambler t-shirts!

Join GDI

If you would like to enroll in any of the courses available in your city, the procedure is simple! Just go to the Girl Develop It website, choose your city, and book your place through Meetup, or get in touch with the organizers by sending them an e-mail.

Let’s change the world together!