Girl Develop It is launching a front-end development series

With less than a year under its belt, Girl Develop It Wilmington has been hosting a lot of one-off workshops covering front-end development languages like HTML and CSS. After a few months of operation, students requested learning roadmaps, so co-leads Megan Anthony and Pauline Rubin decided to take the program to the next level by creating a more structured framework through a series of classes.

After attending a national Girl Develop It leadership summit, Anthony heard about what the Minneapolis chapter was doing with its front-end developer series and decided to adopt it for the local Wilmington chapter.

“The only bad thing about the one-off classes is there is no followup,” Anthony said. “This is why we’re so excited to do a course because there are a lot of people that are pursing this as a career path and they’re looking for continuity. There’s no other front-end series like this in Wilmington yet.”

The course is open to students from all skill levels, but there’s one, easy-to-fulfill requirement: you need to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS concepts to enroll. This can be achieved through an introductory HTML and CSS Girl Develop It class at any of the 53 chapters around the country, or a free Code Academy or Khan Academy class. The prerequisite was put in place to make the class as accessible as possible but still make sure that students got as much as possible out of the course, Anthony said.

The inaugural cohort, comprised of 12 students, will attend four classes beginning with a Intro to HTML session. The rest of the series will delve into JavaScript, CSS, jQuery and GitHub. Students will have mentors available to them during the series. GDI is currently recruiting mentors and speakers for the series.

The first class, taught by First Ascent Design’s John Himics, will take place Saturday, June 25 at The Mill. To sweeten the deal, First Ascent is offering free web hosting for those attending the course. Co-lead Pauline Rubin (who also co-owns First Ascent Design) wanted to eliminate one of the barriers to learning web design for the cohort by providing this service.

http://www.meetup.com/Girl-Develop-It-Wilmington/events/230813236/

“It’s hard to work on a website if you don’t have the hosting that goes along with it,” Rubin said. “Even though it’s only $10-20 a month, when you’re first starting out you’re not sure if that’s something you want to invest in.”

The point of GDI is to increase the number of women in tech, Anthony said, though men will not be excluded.