Open Source and Feelings

For the past year in Chicago, I’ve been teaching beginning coding workshops for mothers and daughters. I began the series inspired by my own experiences teaching my daughter HTML, and, most importantly, as a single mother navigating a tech career, who knows firsthand that most tech communities are not designed with the needs of people like me in mind. And, yet, we’re out there, willing, capable and ready, trying to find our ways in anyway.

If we truly want to improve the diversity of our tech communities, we need to talk about how childcare responsibilities disproportionately affect the marginalized, and how to have more empathy for those with those responsibilities. Let’s talk about how to create successfully family-inclusive events, how to care for the carers, and how we can all work together to build a strong, open pathway for the next generation.