Note-Taking for Self-Taught Students

How to take exceptional notes while teaching yourself As self-taught students, we are becoming attuned to our learning strengths in a way that traditionally-taught students may never have tapped into. When we do anything independently, it reinforces our self-discipline. You know that the outcome of your efforts is within your control; in your hands. You can […]

Ego Has No Place in Education

I started teaching myself web development nearly a year and a half ago (WOW!), and I’ve been stuck on a plateau for a while now. I had a lot of web development knowledge in the Front End, within HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other languages. [If you’re not sure of the differences between front and back end […]

The Path from MUD to OOP

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my origins — mainly because I take a lot of it for granted, despite so much of my experience contributing to the person I am today. So many of us programmers have incredibly cool, diverse backgrounds and experiences. I was raised by my grandparents since I was young, for example. […]

Read Other People’s Code

On the importance of reading others’ code, and how it can make you a better programmer.

Reflections On 2015: My First Year of Coding

Happy New Year, LVEC readers and fans! I apologize for the lull in posts, but it’s certainly been for a good reason: I will be returning to my homeland, Massachusetts, at the end of January to be closer to my family and friends. It’s been a rough time being away from them for 7 years […]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Front End

I’ve been looking for my first web development position for roughly the past 3 months, and it’s starting to take an emotional toll on me. I’ll be the first to admit that making a career transition is hard enough as it is — let alone one into a deeply technical, predominantly male-dominated realm. I’ve been throwing a […]

Programming Principles: Stuff You Need To Learn ASAP

It’s been taking me way too long to come up with new content lately, because I’ve been focusing much more on being accurate in my writing than I should. And conveniently forgetting that the entire point of this thing is to document my own learning process, which is going to be riddled with misinterpretations and […]

Code Speed Dating: Meet CSS

Welcome to Code Speed Dating, where we’ll take a basic 5-minute-read approach to introducing different coding languages. After all, we’re busy people, and don’t have time unless we like what we see. HTML’S creative cousin, the versatile artist This week on Code Speed Dating, we meet another intensely familiar face… much like Hypertext Markup Language […]

Why I’m Scaling Back On Learning To Code (And Ramping Up On Learning Problem Solving)

Wow, it’s been almost a month since I’ve posted! I can’t believe time is flying by so quickly. I have a point to this post (albeit convoluted, as usual), and I’ll get to it, but first… a couple of words about what the hell I’ve been up to! Good (First) Jobs Are Hard To Find The […]

I Will Not Compare Myself To Other Developers

Today, let’s do a little exercise. It won’t hurt… I promise. In fact, it might feel really good. Cathartic, even. Repeat after me: I will not compare myself to other developers. I don’t know why it is that I always do this, but it’s become my mantra not to. Simple, right? Much easier said than done. […]

Code Speed Dating: Meet JavaScript

A brief introduction to a lovely programming language Back into some technical posts! I’ll be doing this little section occasionally called Code Speed Dating, where we’ll take a 5-minute-read approach to introducing different coding languages. After all, we’re busy ladies (and gentlemen), and don’t have time unless we like what we see… Recently, I took a […]

Baby’s First Hackathon

That time I participated in a hackathon 3 months after starting to code Let’s make one thing clear, my dear blog family. I am new to all of this web development stuff, and have no idea what I’m doing. This includes the classes I take online one day to the next, the events I attend, and what […]

Web Development Basics: Front-End vs. Back-End

Okay, I’ve started out on a pretty generalized foot about why web development is in need of more women, but maybe it’s still unclear what web development actually is. Being a beginner myself, I think it’s easiest to talk to other beginners when I’m not yet too deeply entrenched in technical jargon and expertise. I’d like […]

Conversations with Black Women in Web Development — Part I

Black women’s perspectives on the demanding world of web dev One of the most rewarding parts of my newfound career in web development comes from the relationships I didn’t even know I had. Being a part of the Wellesley network on Facebook — and it is quite the extensive network — connected me with tons of […]

Where I Began

Long before the end of my customer service career, there was a girl who loved technology One of the most frequent questions I receive is “how did you get started?”. The answer to this question is oddly complex, because I feel like my decision to “take the plunge” came after years of being deeply entrenched […]