1. Women want to code!
2. Entrepreneurs want to understand where they can meet developers and how to interact and motivate them to join their startups (this is gender neutral).
3. There is a growing gap between entrepreneurs and engineers (once again gender neutral).
Because the panel was brief some questions on each of these points went unaddressed. I’m going to attempt to address some of them now.
1. Just do it! Seriously, if women in their 20s can run companies, 30s can run marathons, 40s can give birth then they can certainly code! Any new skill is daunting (believe me I’ve tried snowboarding on blues…) But the key to learning a new skill is patience, practice, and perseverance. Start by figuring out what you ultimately want to do e.g. designing websites (CSS, HTML, Illustrator/PhotoShop), creating software programs or web applications (Java, Ruby), or pulling data for business reports (mySQL). Next evaluate what kind of learner you are: self or group? If you are good at self-study then go do some tutorials. Don’t do it all in one shot, pace yourself! And if you like learning in groups then go attend a workshop or a class. You can enhance your learning with podcasts on the subject (there are a ton on iTunes), and reading books on the topic.
2. Its no secret developers are a nose-to-the-grindstone bunch. Good developers are especially hard to meet in the wild 🙂 Here are a few secret hide-outs: Hacker Dojo (Mountain View), Meetups (Ruby, Java, iPhone, Android) along the peninsula hosted monthly, and of course un-conferences like CodeCamp, She’s Geeky, and Chirp.
I hate to stereotype but I think there are two key motivating factors: building cool stuff, and solving tough problems. By building cool stuff I mean developers who like to work in a fast paced environment, like a startup, and be a part of a product’s evolution. By solving tough problems I mean developers who like to work in a stable environment and think about tough engineering problems like scaling a database or improving the performance of a site to load photos really fast. Figure out which you want for your company or team. Then motivate them, first and foremost with projects, and second with the autonomy to build or work on those projects and drive the direction of them.
3. This is mostly a communication issue. I’ve noticed a growing trend in entrepreneurs understanding jargon, and even what technologies work best for front vs. back-end development. But I have yet to see a movement in the developer community to create a more articulate bunch of coders that can clearly explain tradeoffs in laymen’s terms e.g. more servers == more $$ or more code clean up == more developer time. I think such initiatives needs to start at the university level, perhaps by incorporating a public speaking component to the curriculum. And in companies managers should force their developers to explain projects and give presentations that are across departments. I don’t think agile does a good job of emphasizing the need to be articulate, but I think it would help with the entire product development process.
