I'm a girl who codes

Not all who wander are lost.

I get this saying aptly because I did a lot of wandering in the ‘Tech wilderness’ before I found my path.

Weeks after graduating from secondary school, I was sitting at home waiting for JAMB(Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board) and ASUU(Academic Staff Union of Universities) to sort themselves out so my admission could be processed. The idleness was eating at me, and so I decided to take up something I’d always wanted to.

I was going to learn how to code. When I told my uncle Ibrahim of my intentions, he was overjoyed and started me out with the concepts of C++. Two weeks and loads of un-compiled code later, I quit. When uncle Ibrahim questioned me, I told him that I wanted to focus on my entrance exams, and he didn’t push.

The truth however, was that I hated failing at anything and so after tiring efforts at debugging my error ridden code I decided programming was not for me. This mind-set would lead me to attempt and quit Web development thrice in the space of two years.

Still yearning to learn coding but not willing to try again, I went searching online and stumbled on a TED talk given by Reshma Saujani, an American lawyer and politician, and the founder of Girls Who Code. In that approximately eleven minute talk, Saujani called out the societal bias which raises girls to be perfect and boys to be brave.

She spoke about her loss in the 2010 Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 14th congressional districtagainst incumbent CongresswomanCarolyn B Maloney, in which she got only 19 percent of the total votes after investing an incredible amount of money into her campaign.She was actually the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress, and described it in that talk as the first brave thing she had ever done, at the age of 33.

As she spoke, I realized there and then that I had keyed into the socialization that I had to be perfect at whatever I did, including coding (which is not possible, really). I was behaving exactly like the Girls Who Code students she talked about, who would rather say they didn’t know what to write, than admit that the code they had earlier written was not working right. Perfection, or bust.

Immediately the video stopped playing, I googled Girls Who Code, and as I read about the troubling statistics, (In 1984, 37% of computer science majors were women, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 18%.) the efforts the Girls who Code team were making to bridge this gap one girl at a time, and of course checked out and went through alumni testimonials and projects, I could feel myself being motivated again.

Now Girls Who Code isn’t available in my country, but I am going to be a girl who codes anyway. So this summer, aided and cheered on by my cousin Jones and one of my closest friends Buddy, I completed a web design course and got started on an incredible project which is still ongoing.

I am now learning JavaScript and JQuery, in view of making my project interactive and creating games for the web. And though I have already experienced demotivation, code not working right for days, and even had an infinite loop crash my PC, I am not going to quit.

I now know that it is okay to not get it right the first time, and waste no time in recommending and sharing resources to friends who indicate interest in learning coding. I want to build a team of young women who are fearless and graciously imperfect in their endeavours. I believe that now, more than any other, is the time to show the tech world what we have to offer.