Disrupted book

Well. That was interesting. And frightening.

Another image: code instructor at St Joseph

Hello Ladies! Do any of you have teaching experience (or inclinations) and want to share your skills with women in need? Are you interested in supporting gender equality in the tech field and eliminating economic class barriers for entry level jobs? I've been working for a great organization called Codetalk that offers a FREE 15 week intensive coding course for the women who need it most. We teach front end development, professional development and meditation techniques for general wellness. We're starting our 6th session in Sept and have recently been funded by Snapchat. Hours would be 8:30am - 1pm M-F. If you are interested you can check out this link and apply: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/STJOSEPHCENTER/93447609-codetalk-instructor

St. Joseph Center

Codetalk Instructor

Santa Monica, CAPart-time

Company Description

Background

Since 1976, St. Joseph Center has been meeting the needs of low-income and homeless individuals and families in Venice, Santa Monica, Mar Vista, and surrounding communities.  The Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community organization that assists people without regard for religious affiliation or lack thereof through comprehensive case management and integrated social service programs.  The Center enjoys broad-based community support as well as a sponsored relationship with its founders, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.  St. Joseph Center serves approximately 6,000 individuals annually.

Brief Description of Principal Activities

Multifaceted intervention, prevention, and education services are carried out at four sites on the Westside of Los Angeles.  St. Joseph Center’s integrated programs provide clients with concentrated and coordinated access to services according to the nature of their needs.

Intervention Services

Homeless Service Center

• Chronic Homeless Initiatives
• Bread and Roses Café
• Housing Services
• Senior Services
• Monetary Advisory Program
• Veterans Representative Payee Program
• Prevention and Education Services

Food Pantry

• Culinary Training Program
• Early Learning Center
• Youth Resource Team

Job Description

Collaborate and work with second instructor to oversee all on-site classroom instruction.

Help maintain all program curriculum, assignments, projects, homework, cheat sheets, assessments, and other materials & resources for class. This includes documenting and archiving lessons and lesson plans, creating new assignments and lessons as needed, managing all student resources in Google Drive and the Student Portal, and managing all other online class resources.

Update instructor and student logs daily with progress and student updates, keeping the gradebook updated and tracking daily attendance & tardiness, tracking all student progress and assessment scores, and producing midterm progress reports and final reports, and periodically meeting with students individually.

Provide feedback on all student projects and assignments. Work individually with students when necessary. Be available during breaks and before class for student support and additional assistance.

Be consistent with classroom policies, create contracts with student, and enforce policies, including student meetings, warning letters, and consistent communication with SJC case workers.

Able to work with a diverse range of students and learning abilities. Concerned with helping students understand the material and sensitive to the barriers students may be going through that affect progress. Passionate about the cause, aligned with the vision of the program.

Have proven competency and be able to teach the following subject areas:

• HTML
• CSS
• jQuery & Introductory JavaScript
• GitHub & Basic Command Line
• WordPress
• Migrating and Transferring Sites
• Familiarity with Agile/SCRUM Methodology
• Mac OS

Hours: 25 hours/week
Monday - Friday (9am - 1pm) Instruction & Lab = 20 hours
Monday - Friday (8am - 9am) Planning/Curriculum Prep/Student Logs = 5 hours

Qualifications

Have proven competency and be able to teach the following subject areas:

• HTML
• CSS
• jQuery & Introductory JavaScript
• GitHub & Basic Command Line
• WordPress
• Migrating and Transferring Sites
• Familiarity with Agile/SCRUM Methodology
• Mac OS

Additional Information
Status: Part Time/ Non-Exempt (25 hours/week)

Salary: DOE

Employment with St. Joseph Center is contingent on completion of satisfactory background check.

Completed: FCCamp "Build a Wikipedia Viewer"

Done!!! Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration: the "finished" app is not very beautiful. BUT IT WORKS. And the assignment was to re-create the "functionality", not the pretty design.

After fours months of frustration -- partly due to technical problems, partly due to my outside life preventing me getting any coding hours -- it's a bit of a shock to sit down and just finish it! Clickity click! As if this FreeCodeCamp this was just a normal class/job and not a Nemesis!

I do have good hope that the "outside life" problem that was solved during the past four months is a true change, and now I will be able to make much more progress...

Next FCCamp task: another API exercise, this time for Twitch.tv (something I am not a user of.)

Inspiring

Not a very common sort of job ad. But inspiring that it exists.

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FULL-STACK DEVELOPER

Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) is offering a unique opportunity to use your technical skills to change the future of sexual health and wellbeing.

SHI is a woman-founded and women-led nonprofit startup that builds technology to advance sexual health and wellbeing in the United States. We are hiring a highly-motivated full-stack web developer to work on Callisto, our largest program and main initiative. Callisto is a third-party sexual assault reporting system designed to provide a more empowering reporting experience for college sexual assault survivors and to facilitate the identification of repeat assailants.

You have:

• Familiarity with and experience working in an MVC framework (like Django or Rails)
• Deep empathy for our users, especially with regards to their privacy
• Sensitivity to confidential information, data integrity, and security
• A practical, product-focused approach to web development
• Ability to work independently and proactively
• Resourcefulness and the ability to prioritize
• Strong communication skills and an understanding of the challenges and joys of remote work
• A demonstrated drive to learn new things and continually develop your skills

We will give you:

• A hands-on education in web accessibility and application security
• Trust and support to make technical decisions and decide on direction
• Experience working on and maintaining open source projects
• A professional development budget and guidance to help your career grow as our organization grows
• Flexible work hours and location
• Full benefits package
• Paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave
• $80k-$90k/yr salary, commensurate with experience
• Purposeful and fulfilling work toward a noble mission

SHI is a small, close-knit team that values transparency and honest communication. You will be working closely with the Chief Technology Officer on every part of the Callisto stack. Right now, that includes Heroku, Postgres, Python, Django, Bootstrap, and Javascript. Our priorities as a technical organization are security, accessibility, user experience, and engineering best practices, such as automated testing and continuous integration. If you’re not sure if you should apply or not, you should!

Location: SHI has offices in San Francisco and New York City. In this position, you will have the opportunity to work remotely or from our offices. This is a full-time position. Travel expected once a year.

How to Apply:
Please submit the following documents to jobs@sexualhealthinnovations.org with the subject line “Full Stack Developer”:

• Resume
• Cover Letter
• Any relevant projects in your portfolio that you can share

Developers of color are especially encouraged to apply. Trans and non-binary developers are especially encouraged to apply. Queer developers are especially encouraged to apply. Developers with disabilities are especially encouraged to apply. Developers on their 2nd or 3rd career are especially encouraged to apply. Your perspective is invaluable to our work.

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SHI is an equal opportunity employer. It is our policy to comply with all federal, state and local equal opportunity and nondiscrimination laws. Our policy is to afford equal opportunity in all aspects of employment to all persons, including applicants, volunteers and independent contractors, without unlawfully discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, ethnicity, religion, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming), sex (including pregnancy, perceived pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, domestic partner status, sexual orientation, status as a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking, enrollment in a public assistance program, physical or mental disabilities, legally protected medical condition or information (including genetic information), family care or medical leave status, military caregiver status, veteran status, political affiliation, or any other protected class category covered by local, state or federal law. Sexual Health Innovations is committed to providing an inclusive environment for all employees, volunteers, board member, contractors, clients, and any other person that interacts with the organization.

Consistent with the law, SHI also makes reasonable accommodations for disabled applicants and employees; for pregnant employees who request an accommodation, with the advice of their health care providers, for pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; for employees who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking; and for applicants and employees based on their religious beliefs and practices.

Traits

From Zed Shaw's twitter feed today: what traits ought to be sought in a senior developer.

Stumbling blocks on the way to Intermediate

Or, "Why I Can't Build a Wikipedia Viewer".

FreeCodeCamp assignment: Build a CodePen.io app that is functionally similar to this:https://codepen.io/FreeCodeCamp/full/wGqEga/.

Reasons I was/am not ready to succeed at this:

1. No training in Ajax --> no ability to recognize, understand and resolve CORS error messages, or even google them successfully. 
2. MediaWiki API documentation extremely hard to understand, inconsistent, etc. 
3. But, even after I finally have the data: Weak coding fluency. Lack of practice. This is not really a roadblock-- I can write the logic, just very slowly.
4. Weak CSS skills. This is a bigger block than #3 -- I lack any practice at doing layouts in CSS, and also I have an irritable mental block along the lines of, I am not a graphic designer, I don't like CSS anyway, who cares about boring front end stuff, etc. This needs to be burned through and cured. Even if "front end" does not become my passion, I need to be competent. And get over myself.
5. Anger at FCCamp for making this one too hard.

The project landed on my desk March 16! It's been unhurdled for four months now!

Remedies:

1. After hours of research and study on Ajax (XHR, CORS, JSONP, etc), I think I have the basics of comprehension in place now. Check.
2. After hours of reading and struggle, I decided I had learned as much as I was going to learn and gave myself permission to just use someone else's (a FFCamp "staff" person's) code to get the data out of Wikipedia. Clearly FFCamp had intended this to be an exercise in writing code to display API data, not in mastering one particular labyrinthine API. That's where I am as of today: working on just getting the data out, without putting further effort into 100% understanding what all the little MediaWiki API commands actually mean.
3. Practice and study. FCCamp, I guess? Too bad no Jed Shaw text for front end.
4. Practice and study. Need to find more assignments and push more of this into my brain. Subscribed myself to CSS Tricks weekly newsletter to make sure it keeps flashing in front of my eyes. Here's a test page to remind myself what "competent" might look like. And a random list of lessons and exercises to try.
5. Wait for others to complain and FCCamp to resolve. Looking at the assigned model today: yep, it looks like they did make it easier: no more little thumbnail photos, and no more live responses as you type. Good. They are supposed to be training me, not hazing me.

Coding Journey overview: beginning third summer session...

Year Zero

May 2013: My kid wins a prize, and we visit Google campus. The vibe is attractive. Lots of happy grown-up gifted kids.

October 2013: Hour of Code. Cheerleading YouTube videos featuring president Obama etc. Somehow I take the message seriously.

Year One

July 2014: While kid is busy in summer program (twelve half days), I complete an introduction to programming in python on MIT Open Courseware. (The EdX version did not yet exist.)

Year Two

May 2015: Started FreeCodeCamp.

Fall 2015: "Blank Semester Here." Social and family structures, unhappy with my increasing mental independence, go into extreme fight back mode.

Spring 2016: Back in the saddle. Somewhat. But a new hurdle: transitioning from "Beginner" to "Low Intermediate", and FreeCodeCamp suddenly much less helpful. "Build a Wikipedia Viewer" project becomes a mental and emotional roadblock. (Also, to build "intermediate" projects I really to put in some solid hours, and my schedule has not allowed. However, the gradual cleaning up of the Fall 2015 mess may be leaving some new open spaces.)

Year Three

Summer 2016: The "12 half days" of kid-in-camp begins today. What will I be able to get done this year?

Getting a Coding Job For Dummies, by Nikhil Abraham

More culture/orientation material. Surprisingly helpful, despite the annoying title. Thank you, public library, for buying some new computer-related books.

Slowly, slowly, becoming less disoriented, clueless and "behind"...

• Part I: Getting a Job in Coding 
•  Chapter 1: Seeing the Big Picture 
•  Chapter 2: Exploring Coding Career Paths 
•  Chapter 3: Working as a Coder 
•  Chapter 4: Understanding Key Coding Concepts 
• Part II: Technologies Used When Coding 
•  Chapter 5: Creating a Website 
•  Chapter 6: Programming with Ruby and Python 
•  Chapter 7: Creating Mobile Apps 
•  Chapter 8: Analyzing Big Data 
• Part III: Getting Your Coding Education 
•  Chapter 9: Coding on Your Own 
•  Chapter 10: Going to Boot Camp
•  Chapter 11: Exploring Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees
•  Chapter 12: Training on the Job 
• Part IV: Launching Your Career Path 
• Chapter 13: Building Your Portfolio Site 
• Chapter 14: Networking for Opportunities 
• Chapter 15: Interviewing and Becoming a Star
• Part V: The Part of Tens 
• Chapter 16: Ten Interview Questions Decoded 
• Chapter 17: Ten Job Search Strategies
• Chapter 18: Ten Coding Myths 
• Chapter 19: Ten Coding Job Websites