"Finding a girl who can code is like finding a Unicorn" - My Partner in Crime, CEO of a New York Startup.

In all honesty, I'm reasonably sure that Unicorn's are more rare than female coders, and the numbers (of female programmers) are fast growing. But, in a world with ever increasing demand for good developers, where female engineers are still a fairly rare commidity, the opportunities are growing. This is something that I've known for a while - you don't spend any time at Google without noticing two things.
1. If you can code, you can do almost anything.
2. If you're a girl who can code, not only can you sit at the table, you're actually asked to.

Even knowing these things though, apart from dabbling in a bit of JavaScript and HTML for work, learning to code had sat on my wish list for some time, alongside learning French and saving for a house deposit. It wasn't until I quit Google, and started to build things for my own startup (HTML, Jquery and CSS at first) that I caught the bug. Seeing things that you've built yourself, appear on a screen and actually do something was, and remains, incredibly exciting. Imagine my surprise, I was hooked!

I decided to focus on coding properly - at first in conjunction with the startup, but increasingly because in itself it was so enjoyable. But learning alone, even with Stack Overflow and a ton of online communities (I was in the UK's West Country at the time, so in person meetups were tricky) and books, was stodgy, slow, and frankly, pretty frustrating. What I needed was a bit of grease for my training wheels.

Enter Bloc.io

Bloc offers a 3 month apprenticeship in Rails, with a mentor, who you can meet pretty much as often as you like. It has the added benefit of being remote, which was an important requirement for me at the time. If that hadn't been important, I may have tried an in person course with General Assembly, or similar - it would have been much pricier, but having an in person connection may have helped me learn faster.

Bloc make clear on Quora and on their site that you need to make a big time commitment to get the most out of it, so I decided to focus full time on it, which turned out to be very lucky for three reasons.

First, if you're starting out with coding with Bloc or anything like it, I'd highly recommend doing as much prep work as possible with the language that you'll be using - I went in fairly blind to backend coding, and ended up supplimenting the curriculum with Treehouse, Lynda, CodeCademy, CodeSchool and a couple of books. Such an immersive experience was great, but I could have saved myself a lot of frustration by prepping better. If I had been trying to do a job at the same time it would have been very hard to do that.

Secondly, the final project that I wanted to build was pretty huge, and without the time to focus on it, I doubt I would have gotten so far. In itself, finishing an app (or should I say, having something ready enough to show people) wasn't the aim of me taking the course, but seeing something that you built atcually working is just wonderful, and is a big pay off for your hard work.

Thirdly, what better way to test if you actually like programming? After 4 months coding full time (I've carried on coding 24/7 since I graduated from Bloc last month - taking full advantage of their alumni chatroom also) I can honestly say that I don't just like coding, I love it!

So much infact, that I secided to dive in deeper to the frontend with Thinkful

Thinkful's offering is less hands on than Bloc, which worked for me because the last month of Bloc overlapped with the first of Thinkful - they say 10 hours a week for their materials, though each Unit ends with a project, which you can go as deep into as you like. With Thinkful, I've been able to expand my knowledge of Javascript, Jquery, HTML, CSS, JSON and AJAX, and I have a weekly meeting with my mentor.

So Where To Now?

After 4 months of coding, I know two things for certain, I love coding, and I have only barely scraped the surface! My plan for the next few months is to immerse myself in Java, with a view of becoming profficient with Android over the next few years. If I can, I'd like to practice for 6 months, and then work with Android as a full time job, get in 10,000 hours, and be at the eppicenter of the next tech revolution... Not that I dream big or anything!

Anyone, male or female, who'd like to hear more about my experience of starting to code from scratch, please reachout to me, I'd love to help in any way that I can.

"One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years."- Tom Wolfe

After life as a hard core nomad for the last few years - first for work and then as part of what I should describe as a period of self-discovery - I'm very happy to be starting to call this amazing city "home". For me, New York is a great deal like London, but on steroids. It's like someone took an already eclectic and sprawling city, and squished it into a 10th of the space. For some, this makes New York too intense, but after living in a place as One Dimensional as Dubai for so long, being in this city is like being brought back to life.

No where else can you find such diversity. In a day, you can almost take a world tour. See hear and taste the flavours of a good proportion of the planet. No where else can you find such energy, such enterprise, such a mix of people. In just a month, I've mixed with Programmers, Entrepreneurs, Artists, Actors, Designers, Financiers, Photographers and Ecologists. Everyone contributing in a real way to something larger than themselves, each of them able to do things that, in many circles, would either never be dreamt up or deemed to be impossible.

I found this quote from Walter Kirin, on my quest to surmise this particular New York feeling, which I think rings true to many more professions than writing:

"My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do."

Here's to New York, and the unbelievable places that it can take you.

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.― Augustine of Hippo

My first solo foray into Rails, as my Bloc.io final project, TravelPoker.co is a travel site, designed to inspire travel and spread recommendations between people in the know. After a trip to Costa Rica, where we tried using an electronic version of The Lonely Planet (neither the same as a pysical book, or easy to use) and were plagued with Trip Advisor results on searches (never the most inspiring), I was drwan to the idea of building a site that would allow people to gather great travel experiences together, create recommendation lists for places that they have visited, and easily find places recommended by others.

TravelPoker is the result of this first dive into Rails, and I hope to continue developing it (and recording my own travel experiences and plans) during my spare time.

"This may be the purest form of democracy the world has ever known, and I — for one — am thrilled to be here to watch it unfold."- Paco Ahlgren

Bitcoin is awesome, a revolution of money, an economy based on technology, without many of the current pitfalls plaguing traditional currencies and money systems. Instant, cheap to transfer, straight forward to use (after an initial learning curve), the volume of BTC transfers has already exceeded international transfers through Western Union.

Of course, it isn't without it's flaws. Security can be tricky, you need to learn how to use it, it can be hard to comprehend, and as it stands, once a BTC is lost, it's lost. Over the next few years, I'm extremely excited about the development of services for BTC users, and technologies surrpunding it. I think that "the internet of things" and Bitcoin are going to work in a very interesting way together.

While I'm just beginning my foray into Java though, here is a silly app to track the BTC price - BouncyBitcoin

"Grow old with me! The best is yet to be." - Robert Browning

If you've got this far, you're probably my Mum, so you know all of this already! If not, here's a confession. After leaving Google, I've ended up falling in love with programming, and I have some solid goals for what I would like to learn and work on in the future, but I didn't start out that way. I left Google, and I embarked on this journey of learning, because of a boy.

I met my Partner in Crime at a Google event that I was running, in Saudi Arabia. At the time, I had found this fabulous loop hole in the Universe, which allowed me to travel all around the Middle East, teaching people about Google, and holding events (or conferences) for the local populations in those countries, and getting paid for it! I travelled constantly, and whilst it was logistically beasty, I was having a whale of a time. What could possibly have made things more logistically complicated?

Meeting someone who lived in New York, that's what! I moved around almost constantly - between the UK to see friends and family, The Middle East, where I lived and worked, with occasional throwins from India and Europe. But the US wasn't a regular destination, until then.

To cut a long (and interesting at least to me) story short, after 9 months of multi continent logictics and travel, I had finally had enough. I made the HUGE and very difficult decision to leave Google's soft and comforting arms, and over 3 months, put in motion a migration from the UAE. Since then the last 10 months have been spent between the US and the UK, with a few trips to other places, just to make us difficult to track down. As of November 2013 though we have decided to settle into New York together, he has his start up, I have coding, and fingers crossed, we will stay still for a while...