On Saturday morning, I drove to Bean Traders in Durham for a meetup of Girl Develop It RDU. Although 30 people had RSVPed, only around half showed up. This proved to be the perfect number as we were able to break into groups of 3-4 people and talk casually about coding and life in tech. I was sitting with three women: one worked at a traditional tech firm rewriting legacy code, one worked at Spoonflower, a company that prints artwork on fabric and paper for crafting, and one who had just moved here and was looking for work.

By talking to these women, I was able to see a real division between people who had studied Computer Science in school and those who had gone to bootcamp like Ironyard. The woman who worked at Spoonflower learned rails at Ironyard and she said that the experience was like “drowning kittens.” She seemed the most contented in her position as she had chosen to branch out from her arts background into tech. The other two seemed frustrated by the languages that they were forced to work with and those that they were still trying to learn. It is difficult to keep up with the different languages each company uses and one has to be a jack of all trades.

They asked me about my experience learning python and they were impressed with my turtle program (or, at least, they pretended to be impressed). None of them had any fun while learning to program, while we definitely emphasized the fun aspects of coding. They didn’t talk much about being women in mostly male fields, partially because the woman at the traditional firm had few colleagues and the Spoonflower employee works at a woman-centered business. It was nice to connect with people who program for a living, but I felt like a total newbie. They asked me questions that I didn’t know how to answer and talked about things that went over my head. Still, they were friendly and welcoming. Also, the lavender blueberry waffles were out of this world!