From Hello World to Hello Job

We are having our first Panel for Women Who Code DC! Serious thank you to Living Social for hosting us. They will be providing food and potentially filming the event at their gorgeous location.

We have three incredibly awesome female devs that all taught themselves to code through various resources. Not only did they learn on their own, they all have really kickass developer jobs now, so we are excited to bring them together to talk about their experiences. To quickly introduce them (without spoiling anything from the event), we have:

Kristen Novak
Kristen is a mobile developer specializing in interaction technologies, who taught herself to code almost 10 years ago! At the moment she specializes in iOS development at AKQA (https://www.akqa.com/), but also works a lot with Android, Glass, and other wearables. Before that she did kiosk and installation development and has an incredible perspective of getting into the tech field when there really was no one else like her around.

Natasha Murashev
Fun fact: one of the places Natasha first started coding at was Women Who Code SF! She began with Java and then went to Ruby on Rails and Mobile bootcamps that really helped her ramp up from beginner to a full time developer. She now works at Capital One (https://www.capitalone.com/) on all sorts of iOS related projects. Her blog, http://natashatherobot.com/ was one of the building blocks she used while she started to code, and is quickly becoming one of the biggest blogs for Swift development!

Amy Lai
Amy used to be a pharmaceutical research chemist with zero programming experience when she started watching MIT's Intro to Computer Science courses online on a whim and was quickly hooked. She then attended Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco where Natasha (small world!) was her mentor, and she is now a Rails developer at GeneDx (https://www.genedx.com/).

We are crazy excited to talk about the road from coding newbie to hired developer! We have some questions and topics planned - but if you think of anything that you would love to hear about, shoot it to us with this google doc (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YHGFfWLz09aqjcScfRWB0HVGEwwbpoARqcNU8NFcd4o/viewform?usp=send_form). We would love to try and incorporate it!