Back in April, I had the good fortune of discovering that the GirlDevelopIt organization was looking to create a San Francisco chapter, and they were happy to let me lead that up. We started slow, with an HTML/CSS workshop, then a JavaScript workshop, and then suddenly, we were holding workshops every week, with new TAs helping out, new topics being explored, and new friendships being formed at each of them. It's been an amazing 7 months, and I want to start this post by thanking everyone who's helped.
First, thank you to the companies (and the great people from them) that lent us their space and sponsored our fuel:
- Twilio and Meghan Murphy, who has hosted us 6 times now!
- SendGrid who provides both snacks and a space at the Hatchery, thanks to Adria Richards
- Voxer and Kit Cambridge, for hosting our advanced JS workshop series.
- Yelp and Julia Nguyen for hosting advanced CSS and JS workshops.
- Storify and Bo Hee Kim for hosting our inaugural NodeJS server-side workshop.
- SauceLabs and their engineers for hosting and teaching us all about Selenium and asynchronous programming.
- Twitter SF for hosting our very first JavaScript classes.
- Disqus and Anton Kovalyov for hosting our first HTML/CSS workshop.
- Mozilla SF and Sunny Lee for hosting hack nights and a workshop - it's pretty cool to be learning HTML at the office for one of the original browsers!
Next, thank you to the teachers that made learning possible and spent hours working on curriculum:
- Liz Howard, who started off TAing, then teaching, then writing a whole NodeJS 2-day class, and now she's helping to organize workshops for other teachers as well.
- Carina Zona, who put together an incredibly informative and interactive command-line Git workshop.
- Gwen Brinsmead and Sheba Najmi, who worked together to create an all-day UI/UX workshop.
- Michell Wetzler, who started off as a student and went on to create an Analytics overview workshop, complete with real data and data analysis.
And thank you to the TAs- many of whom started off as students - like Sharon Wong, Tripta Gupta, Regina Walton, Eva Zamudio, Sarah Adams, and everyone else who spent their free time helping our students learn.
In putting together those lists, I've realized just how many people have helped us get to where we are today. Here's where we are, in numbers:
- 796 members
- 20 workshops
- 7 hack nights
But, numbers, schnumbers. What really matters is the learning and the community that's forming around learning, and that's best shown in pictures and tweets:
So, there you have it: 2012 was a great year for GDI SF, and it was a group effort. I'm looking forward to an even better 2013, and I'll be writing on my thoughts for that in my next post.
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