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Mar 3, 20207 min read

March 3: Women in Tech Weekly Issue 48

Another Women in Tech Weekly Issue, with more amazing women and great resources is here! Read the stories for your weekly dose of inspiration and motivation! Hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy making it 🙂

Don’t forget to share your story for the next one! Make sure to check out the submission form below, and I’ll see you next Tuesday 🙂

Featured Woman 👩‍💻

Lauren Lee and We Belong Here: Lessons from Unconventional Paths to Tech

Lauren is such a bright and bubbly person! Her content is always incredibly positive and funny (in the best kind of way – very, very sarcastic). She is a wonderful human with a powerful message: that everyone belongs in tech, no matter what their background or path is!

And guess what, she has just launched a Twitch channel to help you learn coding with her, called “Lauren Learns Things”. This girl never stops and it’s so inspiring!

Celebrations 🥂🎉

Sundas won an award at Google!

In her own words:

“I won an award at my new job at Google. I started at google 2 months ago and I’m beyond excited to bring home an award. I gave a talk in front of 150 googlers, the talk ended with a standing ovation, following many kudos, fester in org level newsletter and an award.”




A post shared by Sundas | Breaking Stereotypes (@sundaskhalidd) on Feb 21, 2020 at 7:08am PST

Nikita’s team won the first place in the IBM Blue Hackathon!

Nikita and her team (the only all-female team in that hackathon!) worked on a project bridging the communication gap between those who use American Sign Language and those who don’t understand it. They trained a TJBot named Helen to recognise that sign alphabet and translate it into English, saying the words out loud.

This is too cool, Nikita! Thank you for sharing that project in your post and inspiring so many women all over the world. I’m incredibly proud of you and of team “NASAS” 🥰




𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗕𝗠 𝗕𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻🥇 . . In 2017, BlueHack the first 72hr virtual hack-a-thon held by IBM. A total of 77 teams from 20 different IBM sites around the US competed in 4 different categories. Competing against PHD and Graduate Level university students from MIT, Purdue, Cornell, Georgia Tech, UC Berkeley. . Shonda Witherspoon, Shalisha Witherspoon, Alice Song, Aditi Agarwal, and myself were members of “Team NASAS.” Our team consisted of five women (the only all-female team to compete in the hack-a-thon), where we chose to compete in the IoT + TJBot challenge . We were inspired by the main characters in the movie “Hidden Figures,” NASA Employees Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Katherine Johnson. Women of color who were essential to the success of the first mission launch, hence our team name “NASAS” (Nikita-Alice-Shonda-Aditi-Shalisha). . For the project, we decided to use the TJBot to translate the manual alphabet (American Sign Language) to build a bridge of communication between those who understand ASL and those who do not. In order to do this, they trained the TJBot named Helen (in honor of Helen Keller), to learn the manual alphabet through Watson Visual Recognition services, and then translate and speak each spelled word with Watson Text to Speech services. . Our team had differences in experience, where we come from, level of education, backgrounds in engineering, and what was the only commonality? I proudly say, this team of young female student engineers who wish to be the representation in STEM across the board . #Diversity #WomenInStem #IBM #hackathon #ibmwatson #ibmresearch #womenofcolor #womenengineers

A post shared by NIKITA | NYC Programmer 💛 (@karim_nikita) on Feb 27, 2020 at 12:13am PST

Anisa has launched her podcast, “No Starving Artist”!

The first episode is an introduction to Anisa’s mission and her creative background. It also talks about how you can claim your creativity and that you’re an artist. The message is incredibly empowering, so make sure you give it a listen!

Congratulations, Anisa! Very excited to follow your thoughts about creativity in this format ❤️ I love your message and very grateful that you’re sharing it with the world!




A post shared by ANISA | CREATIVE WELLNESS (@anisabenitez) on Mar 1, 2020 at 1:58pm PST

Alex got an interview with Pandora Radio!

Congratulations and good luck girl! Hard work always pays off 💪 We’re all cheering for you!

Regardless of the outcome, this is a wonderful step in your awesome career!




A post shared by Alex Rhodes (@alexcodes.io) on Feb 29, 2020 at 8:01am PST

Lauren has started her live coding series on Twitch: “Lauren Learns Things”!

It’s a channel dedicated to learning from experts and building cool things with tech 😎

This is such a cool initiative, Lauren! Congratulations on launching this! Very excited to see what you get up to with this series and also to watch you build things live!




Tomorrow, I’m doing it. • I’m starting my live coding series on Twitch: “Lauren Learns Things” • Tune in and join me- code along, chat, ask questions, & be apart of the community! • Twitch.tv/lolocoding @ 2:00pm EST (link in my bio) • I’ll be honest, I’m pretty terrified. I’ve only ever live coded in front of an audience after incessantly practicing the steps of the code over and over again. But tomorrow, this will be entirely different. It’s totally unscripted and raw coding. I will mess up. I will make mistakes. But it’ll also be fun, honest, and a reminder to us all that you’ve got to start somewhere. And that growth is impossible without mistakes and feeling that terrifying feeling of vulnerability. • This weekly series will document my journey learning things, trying out new coding languages, and experimenting with different APIs and products. My friends & colleagues will join me to share their wisdom and expertise to help me level up my skills and coding abilities! • Right now, I‘m feeling beyond nervous about the entire endeavor. But I’m trying to remind myself that that’s the ENTIRE point and *hopefully we’ll get through it together!?* • This picture was taken midway thru a dry run in which NOTHING was working- the audio wouldn’t sync, the chat wouldn’t show up, and Cub refused to get out of the shot. So🤞here’s hoping tomorrow goes a bit smoother! • But hey, even it’s a colossal failure, it’s a practice in being vulnerable, taking a risk, and trying something new, right!? #2020goals

A post shared by Lauren Lee (@lolocoding) on Feb 25, 2020 at 5:20pm PST

Mary was featured in Forbes!

What a wonderful feature, congratulations, Mary!! Super well deserved, thank you for sharing your badass and super inspiring story with the world! 😍




A post shared by Mary “Win” ♥ (@marynguyenco) on Mar 2, 2020 at 9:10am PST

Resources 👩‍💻

An awesome Introduction to Git – created by Maria

Maria shares amazing nuggets of knowledge on a regular basis! This one caught my attention in particular because I remember how intimidating Git felt the first time I used it. If you feel the same way, make sure you read her awesome post!




⚡Git is the most commonly used version control system. It is useful to anyone who writes code or wants to track changes to files. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⚡Git is very useful as it tracks the changes you make to files and have a record of what has been done so far in your code. You can then revert to specific versions in case if you want to discard latest changes. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⚡Most importantly Git makes teamwork much easier and is used by most of the companies today allowing changes by multiple people to be done and merged into one source. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⚡And it is not as hard as it might seem in the beginning! Swipe to read most commonly used commands and the right way to use. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Do you use Git regularly? Have you ever struggled with it?

A post shared by Maria | Software Engineer (@codingwith_maria) on Mar 1, 2020 at 8:37am PST

Over the last few years, I’ve built some life-changing self-love habits and I want to share them with you so that you can also do the same!


Programming is fun, but when you’re a complete beginner it can be daunting, especially because there are so many programming languages out there! Many people have a hard time deciding which programming language they should start with, but the thing is, the answer is different for everyone.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below and if you’d like to share something for next week’s issue, here’s the submission form!! Bookmark that and add anything you’d like to share in there 🙂

</Coding Blonde>

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