Dear 10 Year Old Me: Code Like A Girl

Dear 10 Year Old Me:

Code like a girl. Keep a notebook filled with Hex code colors for your latest website design. Dream in CSS and HTML. Download freeware applications to build animated .gifs of Sailor Moon members. Spend your entire weekend animating. Sneak downstairs to the Study to keep working on it during school nights. Use graphing paper meant for your Grade Five math class on your designs. Start playing around with the idea of vectors. Dream about going to work for Pixar.

Convince your dad to let you buy an original pink iMac with your allowance that you've saved for years. Borrow computer manuals from your local library. Learn to take apart your iMac to update its hardware. Take apart your iMac just to see the inside of it. Purchase a spare hard drive in quarters. Lose a screw taking the old hard drive out. Lose three screws trying to install the new one. Spend three hours finding appropriate screws to replace the ones you lost in the machine. Chuckle every time your move your iMac at the sound of rattling screws over the next decade.

Spend your university career in incubators.  Keep up with CSS and HTML. Learn Ruby for fun. Even when you are not on the technical side of the table, keep technical notes. Ask technical questions to completely understand the proposals being sent out. Start teaching yourself PHP to understand even more. Ask to see the backend of each deployment. Ask to see the wire frames. Ask the development team as many technical questions as possible.

Start asking other females in tech questions. Start going to events for females in tech. Start supporting other minorities in the field. Talk about coding with your young cousins, with nieces, with random people at the library. Keep talking about coding and technology as a female. Most of all, keep coding like a girl.

Love,

Future Me

Today is the International Day of the Girl. Support programs that aim to inspire girls to working in technology like Code Like A Girl, Hive WR, and Hatch Canada. Most of all, keep coding like a girl.