CodeNewbie

Latest Episodes:

S2:E6 - Who decides the future of CSS? (Jen Simmons) Dec 04, 2017

Show notes

Working with CSS can be frustrating, and sometimes just plain painful. But if you listen to Jen Simmons talk about CSS, her passion for it might rub off on you. She gives tips on how to make your next CSS adventure more enjoyable, explains how the CSS working group determines new features, and shares the honest ups and downs of her own coding journey.

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Jen Simmons

Jen is a Designer and Developer Advocate at Mozilla, where she advocates for web standards and researches the coming revolution in graphic design on the web. She’s spoken at events including SXSW, An Event Apart, Fluent, Generate, Future of Web Design, and Respond. Her talk, Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts, was awarded Best Conference Presentation at CSS Dev Conf 2014.

S2:E5 - How to create an afro-futuristic virtual reality beauty salon (Carmen Aguilar y Wedge) Nov 27, 2017

Show notes

You put on a headset in a real life beauty salon in real life, and, in seconds, you’re transported to a virtual one. It’s full of colors, shapes, music, and the soothing voice of a narrator. She explains that you’re in a different world now, and you’re about to contribute to the “synaptic lineage.” The setting is intriguing and futuristic, the story is unique, and every detail so carefully laid out. We talk to Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, one of the creators of the NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, a virtual reality experience that’s appeared at Sundance, Tribeca, and a number of other film festivals. She shares how she and her team at Hyphen Labs created this artistic and deeply technical exhibit.

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Carmen Aguilar y Wedge

Aguilar y Wedge is a Latinx engineer, artist and researcher. In 2014, she co-founded Hyphen-Labs, an international team of women with backgrounds in engineering, science, architecture, turned designers synthesizing art and technology to create meaningful experiences. Emphasizing experimentation through worldbuilding, the team finds creative solutions and applications to complex problems using new media, emerging technology, robotics, and computation.

S2:E4 - What makes a good speaker? (Lara Hogan, Kelsey Hightower) Nov 20, 2017

Show notes

This is the last week to submit a talk to Codeland, our annual tech conference, so we wanted to give you some insight on what makes a good talk, a good speaker, and a good proposal. You'll hear from Lara Hogan, who literally wrote the book on public speaking, and Kelsey Hightower, speaker and chair of many tech conferences. They share their personal speaking stories (and nightmares!), how they prepare their talks, and the common mistakes they see first-time speakers make.

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Lara Hogan

Lara is the former VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, co-founder of Wherewithall, a company that coaches and levels up managers, and author of the new bestselling book, Resilient Management.

Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey is an open source advocate and toolsmith and spends most of his time working with people and solving their problems.

S2:E3 - How do tech companies read your resume? (Eddie Washington) Nov 13, 2017

Show notes

Applying to your first technical role (or your second!) can be a long and intimidating process, especially when you're not sure how to stand out. What do tech companies really care about? What should you put on your resume? What should you leave out? We talk to in-house recruiter, Eddie Washington, to give you the scoop on how companies evaluate your application and what you can do to increase your chances of getting that first interview.

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Eddie Washington

Eddie Washington is the recruiting lead at Genius.

S2:E2 - How do browsers work? (Lin Clark) Nov 06, 2017

Show notes

You use the browser all the time, but how much do you really know about it? Lin Clark walks us through all the steps a browser takes to translate your html into pixels on the screen. She also makes these wonderful coding cartoons. She shares her techniques and her process, and how you can apply them to your next technical blog post.

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Lin Clark

Lin makes coding cartoons, and works on the Emerging Technologies group at Mozilla.

S2:E1 - How she built a mobile app to help victims of domestic violence (Alicia Carr) Oct 30, 2017

Show notes

Alicia Carr grew up surrounded by domestic violence. So when she learned about coding, she decided to build a mobile app to help women escape domestic abuse. Her app, Pevo, got the attention of Apple, who featured her in their WWDC promo video. She shares the technical challenges of building this app, the personal challenge of learning to believe in herself, and how she learned the skills to bring this app to life.

Alicia Carr

Alicia V. Carr, is director of Women Who Code and a self taught mobile developer that create a domestic violence app dedicated to helping victims escape abuse. She knew she had to utilize her acquired skills as a developer to make a difference.

S1:E8 - What and why is web animation? (Rachel Lee Nabors) Oct 04, 2017

Show notes

Web animation can be creative and fun, but what does it have to do with building a website? How do you use it in a form or a basic landing page in a way that's actually helpful and not just cute? Rachel Nabors helps us understand what web animation looks like and how to use it to create powerful user experiences. She also shares her own inspiring journey of going from cartoonist to coder.

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Rachel Lee Nabors

Rachel Nabors lives to teach the world to code so others may create a future we can all believe in. They spearheaded the new React and React Native docs at react.dev and reactnative.dev and are consulting in this space after leading developer education at AWS Amplify.

S1:E7 - Why is my website slow? (Lara Hogan) Sep 27, 2017

Show notes

You've got an amazing website. It's beautiful, functional, but it takes forever to load. What do you do? Where do you even begin to debug that? Lara Hogan, VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and author of the book, Designing for Performance, breaks down common web performance issues, tools you can use to diagnose the problem, and how to use AB testing to measure your results. We also have another episode of the Coding Corner, where we unpack three common mistakes newbies make when trying to speed things up!

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Lara Hogan

Lara is the former VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, co-founder of Wherewithall, a company that coaches and levels up managers, and author of the new bestselling book, Resilient Management.

S1:E6 - How to ace a technical interview (Tiffany Peon, La Vesha Parker) Sep 20, 2017

Show notes

Technical interviews are the worst. They’re hard, they’re scary, and they often feel like they’re designed to make you feel stupid. But no worries! We’re here to help. We take a behind-the-scenes look at the interview process at two very prestigious companies, Etsy and the New York Times. Developers La Vesha Parker and Tiffany Peon break down each part of the interview process, giving you examples and explanations of exactly what they’re looking for, and share their own stories of how they got their roles. We also have a second edition of our Coding Corner where we share more interview tips and dissect how to solve a popular interview question, FizzBuzz.

Tiffany Peon

Tiffany is a Software Engineer for cooking.nytimes.com. She lives in Manhattan with her fiancé and guinea pig, Zardulu.

La Vesha Parker

La Vesha (she/her) is a NYC-based engineer at Etsy and an organizer of Progressive HackNight. When not at work, she splits her time between her two passions: tech activism and pottery.

S1:E5 - How to learn React and React Native on a deadline (Brent Vatne, Kim Goulbourne) Sep 13, 2017

Show notes

Kim’s a designer and developer who’s always had a side project. But her latest project was a bit different. Not only did she have to learn a new framework (React), she had to learn it and build her app in a few weeks to make her very public deadline. She shares her process for learning a new javascript framework, and the frustrations she experienced even as a seasoned developer. We also hear from Brent Vatne on how to get started with React and React Native. And for a mini technical deep dive, we unpack the virtual dom, a key feature in React, in our new segment, the Coding Corner.

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Brent Vatne

Brent is a developer at Expo, core contributor to React Native.

Kim Goulbourne

Kim Goulbourne is a Jamaican, award-winning designer and chronic creator, creating a variety of projects under her alias Bourn. She's worked as a design consultant at thoughtbot helping small and big companies create and validate digital products. Throughout her tenure at previous agencies, Ogilvy, Wondersauce and R/GA, she worked on various brand projects from large companies such as IBM, Verizon and Foursquare to newer startups like Vialoure, Master & Dynamic and treStique.