Meet our 600th.. err.. 296th member: Bahareh!

June 9th enters history as the day Girl Code
got her 600th member on Meetup! A day of celebration. A tradition (that started at Girl Coder number 400) is to interview the lucky new member, introduce you to another inspiring woman on here and celebrate YOU. Unfortunately, after several tries we couldn’t reach the Girl Coder in question (long story short: turn on your Meetup messages if you don’t want to miss out on things like these! ;-) ), so we decided to let random.org decide who we would interview to celebrate our 600 members milestone out of the then 614 Girl Coders! ‘Cause we are very lucky to have you all! Random.org chose wisely for one tough cookie, a.k.a. @oneToughCooki22 on Twitter and a.k.a. Bahareh Amali irl. Another awesome example of a truly inspiring Girl Coder! So let the interview begin!

Bahareh moved from Canada to Amsterdam in 2013 to finish her Masters in Urban Planning and she decided to stay. Her field not being an easy job market, always already interested in IT and wanting to improve usability of applications she gave programming a try in 2016 and started to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery through online courses. ‘Cause she’s awesome like that.

What is it that you like about code?
That it empowers to build on your ideas attracts me to it. When I have a cool idea, I want to make it. I see programming as a very powerful means of expression.

For starting Girl Coders who wonder: which online courses did you use?
I’m following the Full Stack JavaScript and Front End Web Development tracks on Treehouse. And, in addition to that I’m one of the campers at FreeCodeCamp and participated in the #100DaysOfCode challenge.

Woo, that’s a commitment! How did you stay disciplined?
I’ve read many books on time management and learned different tactics on how to get things done. At first I tried to stick to the 9 to 5 schedule but slowly I’ve learned to manage my time better and instead of staring at my laptop for 8 hours straight, I cut down the problem into very small pieces and work on them throughout short sprints using Pomodoro clock. Now I work about 4 focused hours everyday including weekends.

What do you do for fun besides coding?
I like to dance and listen to live music and Amsterdam is a great place for that. Once in awhile I go to festivals to enjoy the beats, socialize and practice my Dutch with locals. I am also learning bass, which is great mental exercise.

Any advice for other girls thinking of changing their career to programming?
I would say just take your time and although dipping into different languages may be tempting at first, try sticking to one. Learn it well, get good at it and then move on to the more complicated languages. I would also say join coding groups, Meetups, hackathons and basically immerse yourself in the tech community as much as possible. And remember as Kathy Sierra says: “It takes 200 times of repetition to learn and master a new task”, so don’t get discouraged if you didn’t get it with the first few attempts. We learn most from our failures.

One last random thing you still want to share?
I tweet my ongoing saga, and share programming related books and resources on Twitter. If you are interested you can follow me @oneToughCooki22!

So, as Bahareh advices immerse yourself in the tech community and come to our next meetup ;-) You might run into this inspiring coder and get to meet her yourself! Also, if you’re looking for an awesome front ender to hire, you know where to tweet this One Tough Cookie!

Hope to see you at one of our next events, Bahareh. And thanks again for letting us interview you!

Now at 631, on to the 700th!