natasham25

"Mr. Example shares a photo of his delicious food, Best Buddy shows off his coffee and Miss Hotty shares a photo of her lingerie laying on her bed and a body shot in a changing room. "

Wow! I did not get to that screen, but that's seriously disturbing. Thanks for posting. Surprised none of the mentors at YC mentioned this to them.

Good point - I wish I had the confidence back then to say something. Instead, I just left and never went back. A few months later, I switched to iOS.

> But let me ask when, if ever, your sister will be able to leave that sequestered environment and enter the real world. Isn't it our goal to take down these barriers and achieve gender equality?

Keep in mind this will be her first experience actually programming. I created an iOS app with her - she drew everything an did the voice overs - but hasn't programmed at all.

I want her to get so excited about coding and making something, that she sticks with it. If she's scared away by her first experience, as many women are, there will continue to be a pretty big inequality in tech.

That's why programs like these are so important. I stick with it because I LOVE what I do now and have the confidence and knowledge to stand up to my coworkers, etc - but it took a lot to get to this point. Having safe support in the early stages is critical.

> I know a secret that I'm going to reveal to you -- that works for men too. But it has the unfortunate side effect of making men intolerant of the presence of women. Do you want that outcome for women?

I work with men all day. I also go to meetups where there are men - going to one tonight b/c there is a great speaker and I will not miss out on the opportunity only because there are men at the meetup. Also going to a tech conference later this month, where there will be men.

However, going to these events takes a lot of effort and work for me - I have to deal with people not taking me seriously, guys potentially hitting on me, having to prove myself, etc. Would be great if guys made some effort too, but most don't. I can only tolerate so much of it.

That said, again, if there is a safe space for women to learn together and discuss issues they're facing, they're more likely to stay in the industry, which makes a more equal society of women and men. And as more women work with men in tech as programmers, the more men learn to tolerate and work with women. As more women are supported by other women, we will venture out and go to the normal meetups, but the women who code meetups are a great safe environment to get started with and keep as a support network throughout our careers.

I got my little sister - almost 15 - to apply for this program. It's important for me that she has a very safe and welcoming environment to get excited about coding - since this will be her introduction to it. I feel like having 15-16 year old boys in the program would be very distracting and counterproductive for her.

This is from experience. I'm a woman who codes, and I mostly go to the women who code meetups because I can learn in a safe space that I personally enjoy.

The first time I went to a normal Rails meetup - with majority guys - there were two guys having a pissing contest about whether ERB is better than HAML, and then another guy was apologizing to me for the two guys being "so technical".

In meetups where there are only women, we get to actually learn and support each other, and it's great. I want the same environment for my sister to learn in.

Yep, just like I suspected. Been on there for 10 minutes, and already getting friend requests from creepy guys I've never heard of. I would only use this with close friends.

I like the concept, and event want to use this, but maybe you can have more thought put in to the example friends. I do not categorize my friends as Mr. Example, Miss Hotty, and Best Buddy....especially as a woman. The Miss Hotty is especially creepy - you want guys to send pings to just hot girls? This feels like harassment.

It was a very similar application to the Startup School application.

Thanks YC for putting this conference together. It was seriously the best conference I've ever been to.

The talks were real and gave honest and practical advice we could all relate to. The audience was incredible. Everyone I talked to was a founder and / or engineer. I haven't been at an event with so many impressive women in one room!

We got a glimpse of what a world with a lot more female founders would look like, and it's going to be better than I could have imagined.

KVO is built-in to iOS, but it has some serious issues. One BIG issue is that you have to register to observe a key in order to de-register from it later. If you never register for the key (because it is dynamic for example), and try to de-register, the app will crash. It's a pretty big issue, and this seems to handle it in a pretty elegant way.

I've been coding for only a little over 2.5 years, and especially agree with the point on learning technologies that are significantly different from what you're comfortable with. I started by learning Java to understand programming fundamentals, which made Ruby pretty easy to learn.

I then learned Ruby on Rails, which I thought was a bunch of "magic" until I started learning iOS development. A lot of the Ruby on Rails architecture concepts were very useful in figuring out how to architect my iOS application. Knowing some Java was also super helpful, since Objective-C is a strongly typed language. Learning iOS helped me understand both Rails and iOS better, and why people didn't like Rails. I also feel a lot more comfortable picking up JavaScript frameworks, such as Backbone.js and Angular.js, which were harder for me to understand and pick up when I was just doing Rails.

Next up, I'll be learning a little bit of Android development, hoping to learn the different philosophies for mobile and how to better structure my layouts for different devices, and will probably learn a bunch of other things I can't even think of right now!

Working with amazing engineers who are open to mentoring me has also been priceless.

Would love to use this on my blog all the time, but the price point is way out of range. I've tried it though, and it's incredible if you can afford it.

Thanks for the encouragement. Right now I have a full time job as an iOS developer, so this is just something I'm doing more for fun than for the money. I'm currently in between ideas for my own apps, so working with others seems like fun.

Thanks for reading my stuff :) The journey just gets more fun every day!

I didn't notice this happening on my blog either until a friend notified me. When I looked at my blog post, the ad space was just filled with my own blog posts, so I thought it was cool, since users will be referred to other articles I wrote. However, for everyone else, those slots were ads and links to blog posts outside my blog. I disabled the feature right away. I have my own ways of making money without Disqus helping out incognito, thank you very much.

My problem is not that they have this feature, and I don't really care whether they sent out an email or not. My problem is that it was opt-out, not opt-in, from the start, and they tried to deceive bloggers further by making sure we don't see the ads when we look at our own pages. I chose disqus over facebook comments b/c I can see facebook pulling something like this, but it's definitely disappointing to see from disqus.

Hi, a woman programmer here. I asked a question on StackOverflow once while first learning Python, and got a pretty mean answer. I called the guy out on my blog, of course: http://natashatherobot.com/hey-dude-you-dont-have-to-be-mean....

Before asking the question, I never posted on StackOverflow before, because I expected a mean answer, and that's exactly what happened. StackOverflow is not a very safe place for asking questions. It's a place where guys go to show off how much smarter they are than you. Most of StackOverflow questions start with "I'm a noob at this..." - that's because people, even guys, feel the need to pre-qualify the question by proving that they're not complete idiots despite not knowing the answer.

Asking a question is a vulnerable thing. You are admitting in public that you don't know something. It's really hard to participate when you know the very same public you're trying to get help from will turn around and critique you.

I started getting very slight headaches after staring at a computer all day, so I got Gunnars. The headaches are gone, and I continue to wear them every day. They're a little weird at first, but the brightness of the screen really gets to me now if I dont' wear them.

I've been learning to code on my own for 6-7 months before applying for Dev Bootcamp, and I've tried pretty much every resource. At a certain point, although I've made some serious progress, I hit a wall. I could build things and make them work, but I wanted to follow the best practices and know good from bad code. Dev Bootcamp really filled the gaps in the my knowledge.

That said, Dev Bootcamp is not a necessary condition for learning to code. If you have a specific learning style, especially if you're good at reading books, you can learn on your own, although it might take longer. If you do well with networking, personal branding, build a few projects, and contribute to the open source community, you can get the same result.

I cover all these options in my book, including Hacker Schools all around the world and a lot of online class and resources that are completely free.

I've been learning on my own for about 6 or 7 months before I joined Dev Bootcamp. I wouldn't recommend doing it if you haven't tried learning yourself.

Yes, it can be boiled down to the usual recipe - focus and time. The other component, that I think is really important for learning how to code and is often overlooked, is knowing your learning style and finding the resources that match it - that is how you learn the fastest.

Great idea! This is my first ebook, so I'm still learning :)

I never trust just my willpower, so I trick myself into habits that I want. Want to eat healthy? Only have healthy food at home (no cookies). Want to be productive and not go on Facebook or Hacker News or Twitter? Install Self Control, and have these websites blocked. Want to get out of bed right away? Keep your phone far away from bed, etc. I found this works a lot better than putting myself in the path of tempting bad habits and relying on willpower to ignore these.

This is why I'm a big fan of TDD. You're basically commenting your code in your tests without having to comment the actual code.

The food on there is pretty disgusting. Not sure why startup culture goes together with junk food. It's like buying poison for your team.

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco, remote I'm a full-stack Ruby on Rails developer, with experience in Backbone.js and Test Driven Development.

I'm looking for a 10-15 hour / week project. Available right away, charging cheaper rates as I'm starting out.

Github: https://github.com/NatashaTheRobot Blog: http://natashatherobot.com/

I studied on my own for a year before attending the Summer session of Dev Bootcamp. I found that the available resources for learning Rails are not really that great for beginner. They are more geared toward people who already know how to make sites through other frameworks/languages.

I actually built two Rails apps on my own before attending Dev Bootcamp, but the quality of my code was horrible. I was able to fill in my gaps at knowledge about Rails and Object Oriented design and testing, and can now write nice clean code, versus guessing and putting bandaids on bad code.

Negative reinforcement might get the students to finish the course, but they will not enjoy what they're learning if they're doing it just so they avoid paying money for it. The best learning happens when you want to learn because you're curious and interested in the what you're learning, not because you'll have to pay money for not learning.

I've been to the railsbridge woman's workshop, and while I was able to follow the instructions and build a blog in a day, I didn't understand Ruby on Rails and had no idea how I would do the same thing without following the instructions. Knowing how to follow instructions != understanding the material. Too bad the author saw the girl who was confused as a bimbo instead of taking the time to explain the high level stuff to her.

I've asked my guy friends whether they would get this procedure, and none of them will. Guys expect women to mess with their bodies, but are not willing to make the sacrifice themselves when it comes down to it, even though this is more safe and harmless than pumping your body with hormones every day.

Ok, so I went to the site expecting to get some "buttons" as part of onboarding new users, but instead I started out with 0 buttons and no idea how to get these buttons to actually get a dress. After digging around the FAQ section, it says that I can purchase the buttons for $1 or upload my own dress. I don't have a dress to upload, and buying a used dress for $40 - $110 just doesn't make sense - I can buy a brand new dress for that much. Also, even if I were to upload a dress, I wouldn't get any "buttons" until I actually sell the dress. Not coming back to this site again.

We had the same exact experience with out app. It was Facebook login only, and we got a 50% drop in conversion, bad app store reviews, and some of the people who tried to login couldn't because Facebook login either didn't work or was really slow.