On Friday, August 20, Faye Thompson and I once again co-facilitated Two Midwesterners Politely Invite You To Explore Coding, this time as a 3-hour workshop at Code PaLOUsa 2021. The abstract:
Wonder what it’s like to do what programmers do? Maybe people have tried to explain it, but didn’t put it in terms that computed for you. Or maybe you would like to become more technical, but the mere thought of trying to code has felt intimidating. Today is a new day!
Faye’s a non-programmer from Ohio, Amitai’s a sometimes-programmer from Illinois, and with your help, we’ll solve a problem by thinking and coding together. If you want to, you can take a brief turn at the keyboard; if not, no biggie. When we’re done, we think you’ll have a new kind of feeling about code and coding. You might even want to pursue it further.
We didn’t have much audience participation, possibly because our session had to be rescheduled from Wednesday (against other half-day workshops, but I was traveling to Germany that day) to Friday (against regular-length talks). On the plus side, Faye and I got to spend a few hours together pair programming, culminating in a last-minute pivot to “FizzBuzzBlerg”. And though we don’t usually record this material, the conference has been capturing every session. I’ll share the video if and when they publish.