Sara is a software engineer with a journalism and digital/social media startup background. She began to learn code using Codeschool & Codecademy.

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Show Notes:

• Sara Inés Calderón (@SaraChicaD) | Twitter
• Women Who Code ATX (@wwcodeatx) | Twitter
• Learn to Code by Doing – Code School
• Learn to code | Codecademy
• Sabio – Learn To Code – A Developer Community for All

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Well, Angela, this week we have Sara joining us and she is a new coder out in Austin and she talks us through her journey and just some really awesome stories about how she got here and what’s she’s been through. It’s a great interview.
ANGELA: It is. And before we get into it, I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. That is a general bucket that supports the entire network, but more specifically, because you listen to Women’s Tech Radio, you are supporting us as well. So go to Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get into our interview today by asking Sara what she’s up to in technology today.
SARA: Essentially, right now, I”m a software developer. I live in Austin, Texas. I was a journalist and i worked in digital media for ten years prior to making that transition, which I did with the help of a code bootcamp in Los Angeles called Sabio, which focuses particularly on women and minorities, trying to diversify the tech scene out there. So currently I’ve been working on UIs, utilizing Angular, Bootstrap, and C#.
PAIGE: How do you wrap the C# into that?
SARA: So, essentially, you’re building the UI out for this device and the back end is being written in Java, so we’re writing a dummy backend or whatever in C# just to be able to test the UI out.
PAIGE: That makes sense. Awesome. So it sounds like you’ve had kind of a fun journey. Did you start in Austin and end up back there? How did that all go around?
SARA: Yeah, sure. It’s kind of a funny story, just because I ended up moving between LA. I ended up back and forth between La and Texas so many times I would literally be in Austin saying hey, I’m going to LA and everyone asked me, didn’t you just move here? And I’be be like yes, but I”m going back. ANd then I’d be back in LA and everyone is like hey didn’t you just move to Texas?
ANGELA: Wow.
SARA: So my family is actually from a town here on the Texas border called Eagle Pass and my dad went to grad school in LA at UCLA. And so, ended up living in LA for part of my childhood. And then moved to San Antonio, finished high school out here. Went to school in California. Worked in Texas. Moved to California. Moved back to Texas. Moved to California. Moved back to Texas. So it was really just something that, I think you know, you become a grown up and you say hey what kind of quality of life is for me and personally I, most of my family is in Texas and the pace is just a little bit more my speed, because being stuck in traffic in LA just wasn’t as fun for me anymore. So, yeah, so Austin is great. I think sometimes it as a little bit of a small town for someone who’s use to something bigger. But what I really like about Austin, what I really appreciate, particularly in the tech scene and a lot of the work I do with Women Who Code, is that it’s really easy to know people and get to know people and network with people. And you can literally meet a CEO somewhere, connect with them on LinkedIn, get coffee with them. It’s really kind of a more intimate community, I think, than like a place where LA where there’s just, first of all, it’s just hard to meet people because you have to go across this huge 60 square mile area just to get anywhere. And then you can’t even just get there, you have to fight traffic. And once you get there everyone is very much interested in who are you, what can you do for me, why would I want to talk to you.
ANGELA: It sounds a lot like Austin is very much like Portland.
SARA: Uh, yeah, you know, I haven’t-
PAIGE: This is a frequent comparison that is made.
SARA: Really?
ANGELA: Is it?
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s why we share the slogan keep it weird.
SARA: Keep it weird.
ANGELA: Yeah. Paige is from Portland, so.
SARA: Oh, that’s cool. My brother went to Reede. He’s a graduate, so that’s really the only time I’ve ever been to Portland. I can’t really speak, but it was really nice when I was there. Just a little bit cold for my taste.
PAIGE: It is. The seasons are a bit, it gets cold. I would rather live in the LA area mostly, but I detest cars and traffic for the most part. If I can avoid using a car I will opt for that every time.
SARA: I feel you girl. I’m right there with you.
PAIGE: What do you think is, besides the, so you’ve kind of outlined why LA is not the scene that Austin is, but what do you think it is that makes Austin the scene it is? Because I’ve been to other small tech cities and they don’t, like even in Portland, I would say you have to kind of work to get to meet a CEO. Like, and we have a fair number of startups, the startup scene, because everybody is migrating north from Silicon Valley and they’re winding up in either Portland or Seattle.
SARA: Oh, okay.
PAIGE: But, you know, we have a pretty good scene. It’s a couple years old now really of kind of getting going, but trying to, networking that is still sort of difficult. So what do you think makes the community in Austin tight?
SARA: I think that, you know, my father is a history professor and so I frequently fall back on things like context and history to kind of think about things like that. So Austin has been traditionally a really small town in Texas. So most recently, I think Austin has experienced, probably the last decade in particular, a lot of growth. Compared to what it was historically, Austin was the smallest major city in Texas. I mean, Dallas/Fort Worth were bigger, Houston was bigger, even El Paso was bigger. San Antonio certainly was bigger. So Austin’s growth has been really recent and so I think that that kind of small town flavor, that small town culture is still very much kind of part and parcel of the community here. And I think that kind of the way that it came about was that, again, Austin is a small town, so then people started moving here from other parts of Texas, and, you know, it’s still a small town so people kind of adapt that culture. And then people start moving here from other part of the country and that’s the culture. And so I think it’s just kind of, I think that that’s due mostly to the fact that historically Austin was a pretty small town and still is compared to a lot of the other major Texas metropolitan areas. And so that being said, I know, I have a lot of–you know, obviously, I spent a good chunk of my life in California. I know people, I know there’s crazy people in Texas, but people are really nice. There is a good part about Texas that, there really is a good genuine friendliness in the culture here, which you may not know if you don’t get past the crazy gun stuff. But, you know, and I think that’s another part of it. It’s just, people are nice here. And to your point about the startups, you know, kind of moving and relocating, I have heard on more than one occasion that startup founders or venture capitalist will say things like, well Austin has a really good work/life balance if that’s what you’re into.
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally get that.
SARA: And so we’re a bad thing, right, to not be working all the time. KInd of to that point, there’s just so many, Austin is a really social networky town. I mean, you can literally be drinking every night of the week here, meeting people, if you wanted to do that. I’ve definitely had weeks where I’d go to two or three events, and you know, so those are my thoughts.
PAIGE: That’s a really good way to put that. I think Portland has some of that heritage, but it’s been a little, a little longer.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: And I think the influx is a little bit higher. The gentrification in Portland is starting to pick up pretty bad. I think we had like a 30 percent rent increase in the past year.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s pretty unreal.
ANGELA: Yeah, house values are going up here in Seattle, like a lot.
SARA: A lot.
PAIGE: Yeah, like a lot. It’s is literally like Silicon Valley is just spreading.
SARA: Wow.
PAIGE: So it will be interesting to see. I like the history as well, so it will be interesting to see the numbers come in in the next couple of years of how things change and why.
SARA: Yeah. Similar things are happening in Austin and everyone kind of has different feelings about it, but you can’t really stop demographic shifts, right.
PAIGE: Yeah, we just have to try to, i think, be conscious of them.
SARA: Absolutely.
PAIGE: We can’t stop them, but we can do it intentionally.
SARA: Absolutely. I agree.
PAIGE: So you started out in journalism?
SARA: Yes, so that’s, I get that question sometimes when people hear about my background. I went to school and actually thought I was going to go to law school. I took the LSAT and all that. And I was just thinking, hey I’m going to do this journalism thing for a year before I apply to law school. Well, once it came time to apply to law school I thought, oh my god, I do not want to go to law school. So I ended up making a career out of journalism and I loved it and I was really good at it and I did it in two languages. And, unfortunately, I came into journalism right at that turning point where the web was starting to overtake media in a really kind of forceful way. I’ve literally sat in meetings where people were saying, you know, we actually have more hits on our website than we have subscribers.
PAIGE: Yeah.
SARA: And then the recession hit and media companies, so I tell people sometimes, I’ve been laid off like three times. And they look at me with these, you know, horror in their eyes. I’m like, oh it’s no big deal, it just working in the media. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality is, you know, every quarter you’ve got to have profits, because it’s a publically traded company and the first ones to go.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: So, yeah, so I worked in newspapers here in Texas. I worked in Brownsville, Austin, and San Antonio. So I actually lived here in Austin about 10 years ago, first time. And i loved it and was great at it and unfortunately it didn’t work out for me. And then I thought, okay, hey I’m going to be responsible, I’m going to change careers and I started a master’s in community counseling. Because through my work as a journalist people are always telling me all their problems anyways and I’m a real good listener. And I thought this will be really great, because I’m bilingual. You need more bilingual health workers, right, in Texas. And then I got pulled into a startup and I loved it. And so I started doing digital media. I worked in an industry publication called Inside Facebook, kind of covering the Facebook platform right around the time that Facebook was really deep into monetization, rolling out the pages product and things like that. So I have some pretty detailed memories, excruciatingly detailed memories about Facebook’s development as a monetized platform. But, yeah, and then I started this other startup. It was called News Taco and it was like a digital English language publication for Latinos. And then I worked at another digital startup when I moved to LA called Mitu, Mitu Network and it’s was a YouTube network. I think now it’s kind of more newfangled, new media company. So kind of through all of that I, you know, I see it as kind of like a steady progression of what media is, essentially these days. Anybody can write. Anybody can take pictures. Anyone can do video. So media really is more about medium, right, the medium is the message, right?
ANGELA: Yep.
SARA: So, and that medium is technology. My last position, I really kind of started to dig deep into some more technical things and YouTube’s backend stuff and I thought, hey I can handle technical stuff. I learned all this stuff. And it’s something I’d been wanting to do a while so I decided that I was just going to get a job, marketing job or content management, whatever I could get, and I was going to figure out how to learn to code. So, I”m doing this. I literally have these jobs I’m going to apply to. I had moved back to Austin. I was kind of freelancing. And, like, I’m fixing to apply to these jobs, like the next day, and my friend Liana (unintelligible) from LA, who I met when I was working in LA–we were actually in a room, we were in a Girls in Tech LA event and we were both like, where are the other Latinas. We kind of made a B-line for each other because there were literally on four of us there. That’s how I met her. She calls me up, she says Sara, she’s a cofounder of Sabio, this bootcamp that i mentioned. She says Sara, we have a spot for you. And I”m just like, wow, this is almost like faitful, you know.
PAIGE: Sometimes things just line up like that.
SARA: This really lined up. So I kind of said hey, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s literally knocking down my door, so I kind of dropped my plans to apply to these jobs. I started Code School, Codecademy, JavaScript, all this stuff. What’s Bootstrap? What’s Responsive Design? C#, SQL. So that’s what i did. And then I went to Sabio last year and then I moved back in December and I had an excruciating job search. I tell people, don’t look for a job in December and January. Especially as a newbie, it was hard. I mean, I wrote a story about it on my–I have a platform for Latinos in technology and STEM, it’s called MasWired and I had like 40 interviews between phone calls with recruiters and phone calls online and in-person interviews and technical interviews over the phone. And those kind of like shared develope, I mean, it was just, I counted them, right? And it took me months and I finally, when I did get a job offer I got two.
PAIGE: When it rains it pours.
SARA: Where were you guys all this time, you know. Why are you doing this to me. So, yeah, so since April, so it’s been about, going on seven months, I’ve been working as a software developer and it’s a little bit overwhelming, I’d say. LIke journalism. Journalism and writing and digital media stuff, I just got so good at it that i could do it with my eyes closed. And certainly that’s not something that you ever feel working in technology. So it’s been an interesting adjustment. But, yeah, so that’s kind of how I made that transition.
PAIGE: That is an awesome story.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
SARA: Than you.
PAIGE: That’s very cool.
ANGELA: Lots of moving.
SARA: Yeah. I definitely, I’m just like, ugh, I’m actually buying nice things now so, like, I’m only going to move one or twice more.
ANGELA: It sounds like you’re staying.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s when you know you’ve settled. I’m still not doing that.
ANGELA: Yeah, keeping the boxes broken down in the garage.
PAIGE: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: But, you know, I”m nomadic, so it works that way.
SARA: Oh yeah, I had my nomadic years.
PAIGE: I don’t think I”ll give them up. My dad said to me one time, he’s like, Paige, I’m pretty sure there’s not gypsy blood in the family. I’m like, dad I think you’re wrong. I have so many questions out of your story. I guess the first one is, do you feel like being at a bootcamp that was focused on diversity made a difference in the way that you learned or how you networked afterwards or the support that you got afterwards? Like any of that stuff?
SARA: Sure. So, I can’t really speak, because I’ve never been to any other bootcamps. That being said, I have been around other bootcamps, you know, here in Austin, certainly. And I’ve heard thing from–I’ve had friends who have gone through MakerSquare or General Assembly or whatever other ones, right. We have some Austin Code School or Austin Code Club or something. I would say, I think for me personally, you know, and journalism is also a very male dominated profession, so I wasn’t so freaked out around being around men, but the–I went to Stanford as an undergrad and I just remember being put off by those tech people. And so I was scared about that. And so, I think for me, going to Sabio was really kind of, much more warm and inviting and made me feel like technology was for me. And so that made a huge difference. I think, you know, there were other women there. There were other Latinos there. You know, um, you know, there was African Americans there. It was just kind of an environment that I felt comfortable in while learning this difficult material, right, in a very stressful environment. So, I think as far as the recruiting goes, you know, LA’s tech market, I think my job search would have gone a lot easier had I been in LA, because it’s just a bigger market. I think part of the trouble that I had in Austin finding a job, or why it took me so much longer than it should of is it’s just a smaller market and people here or the companies here seem to really be waiting for those unicorns to come along. You know, the–I saw a meme the other day. It’s like, we’re looking for someone in their 20s with 30 years experience.
ANGELA: Oh, yes, I’ve seen that one before.
PAIGE: Yeah, exactly.
SARA: And so-
PAIGE: Entry-level, seven years experience.
ANGELA: Right.
SARA: Exactly. And that’s kind of what I kept running into, is we want a junior developer for this position who is really, really, really, really, good. I’m like, okay. You know. So, yeah, what I think that I do appreciate about Sabio, and this is my experience, is they’re very focused on creating a community and a network. I think, because of this type of students the they’re focusing on, they understand that hey, you probably don’t have a network in tech, otherwise you would have a network in tech and you wouldn’t need to come to a code school. So there is a really, kind of, active alumni network that I go to all the time. Hey, what about this? Anybody know about this? Hey, you know, and like is this normal, what should I be asking, what should I do. And for me that’s been, that’s probably been one of the best things about my Sabio experience.
PAIGE: What tool do you guys use to do that?
SARA: We have previously used Yammer and now we’re on Slack.
PAIGE: Seems like everybody is on Slack doing this these days.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: It’s a great tool for it.
SARA: Absolutely, yeah. So, and then if you’re in LA they have Professional Development Seminars. They have recruiting events. It’s just really great if you’re in LA and you’re going to work in LA to have this tangible and virtual community. That being said, my mother still lives in LA so I”m going down there for Thanksgiving and there’s going to be a Sabio happy hour and I may get to visit with everybody. I think that’s amazing. A year after I haven’t seen these people, we’re going to get together and have drinks and it will be fun.
ANGELA: That is awesome.
PAIGE: How big was your class?
SARA: So we had eight folks.
PAIGE: Eight.
SARA: There was eight of us.
PAIGE: That’s nice. That’s a good size. So how, did you feel like your journalism skills, like did you find a way to kind of translate them? I think being bilingual should have given you some, there is some similarity between learning a foreign language and learning to code, because you are essentially just learning to talk to a computer. Do you feel like that influenced your learning process and/or did being a journalist who is used to kind of seeking out answers to questions, do you think that influenced it for you?
SARA: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that one of the first–I think that anything that you have to learn changes you to a certain extent, and I would say probably one the ways that journalism changed me the most was just really not having any feelings about asking questions, which makes for some little awkward situations sometimes, because I end up like interrogating people about their personal lives without really meaning to. Just because I’m curious, but I think that served me really, really well in software. Okay, so you want this data on front end. What is it going to do once it gets there. How is this going to be used. Is this anywhere else? Just really drilling down deep into questions so that I can fully understand the task at hand. That has been really helpful. And I think my metaphor for writing code or creating an application, and certainly I”m not as proficient as I would like to be at this point, but kind of my goal is, there’s a really–so, for me, because I’ve been writing for so long as a profession, as a science almost, it’s very formulaic at the end of the day. I know some people, I know a lot of people struggle with writing, but once you’ve written like thousands of things it’s pretty much the same thing over and over again. It’s very formulaic, just like a function, right?
PAIGE: Yep.
SARA: Just like anything you’re going to write in software. It’s like, hey here is the beginning. Here’s a few details about the thing. Here’s how they all tie together. The end. I mean, it’s pretty formulaic for me. I could write anything in a variety of ways, but at its core, that’s what you’re doing. That being said, there’s a verbose way to do that and there’s a succinct way to do that and there’s a romantic way to do that, and there’s a funny way to do that. And that’s kind of how I look at software development, is like you can write the same thing multiple ways, right. So I kind of look at being software developer, my development as a software developer as looking at it like being a writer. I want to be an efficient, interesting, but very pointed writer. Nobody wants to waste words, especially in the digital age when if it’s not 140 characters who cares. I think code is kind of the same thing. Yeah, you can have, nobody reads the source code of Angular. I mean, it’s just too long and it’s too crazy. But people will love a code snippet, right. So how do you ingest all of this stuff and output the most elegant, quick, easy to understand solution. To kind of address your question, I see software development as–I see writing as a metaphor for software development in that it’s very painful to learn how to do it well, but once you get there it’s totally worth it.
PAIGE: I really like that idea. That’s really cool. Like the idea of your code having your voice behind it.
ANGELA: Uh-huh. Yeah.
PAIGE: And I definitely notice that. I think, I can usually tell who on a team has written something by the way it’s written.
SARA: Oh, that’s interesting. That makes sense, yeah.
PAIGE: I mean, unless you have like super song’s file guides someplace too.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Especially in some of the more relaxed languages like JavaScript or Ruby or Python.
SARA: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, actually, now that you say that. I can tell too.
PAIGE: Yeah.
SARA: Huh, that’s cool.
PAIGE: If you like the idea of software having a voice and being really readable, Ruby is a fantastic language for that. It’s actually one of the core foundations of the community. It actually kind of over the years shifted to the idea that even comments are not, shouldn’t be necessary. LIke your code should be human readable enough that you shouldn’t need comments.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Which, I really like that idea.
SARA: Yeah, that’s, I like that too.
PAIGE: So you mentioned that you had 40 job applications. So I have two questions in that.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: How long did that take in a town like Austin and what did you do while you were doing those to kind of keep yourself sharp or, you know, maybe you had to have a job or whatever. And if you had to have a job, like how did you find the time. I have a lot of, in my Women Who Code network we have a lot of bootcamp graduates who are really struggling with that process.
SARA: Sure. I totally lucked out in the sense that I was able to, you know, I’ve always kind of tried to have a side gig going, just to be able to save up money. And so by the time I moved out to Austin I was freelancing. I wasn’t making a whole bunch of money but I was sustaining myself. So I had all this savings, all this money that I had saved up so I was able to go to the bootcamp and work one contract, so it was actually, I was just colleague over lunch, I am way too old to go to bootcamp ever again. It was a great experience. I don’t ever want to do that again. It was like-
ANGELA: What is too old? What makes you too old?
SARA: I just, I just mean that I was going to bootcamp 10 to 12 hours a day.
ANGELA: Oh.
SARA: And then I was going home and I was working.
ANGELA: I see. Yes.
SARA: I was working one to two hours and then I was trying to make my lunch and it was just-
PAIGE: Yeah, like sleep and eat?
SARA: It was just, so tired. It was just so exhausting and I was stretched so thin. You know, when you’re 24, 25 you can do that.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: Because it’s, you know, and I”m not. So i’m just, it was just so intense and so hard and so-
PAIGE: I”m going to ask that personal question.
SARA: Yes.
PAIGE: How old are you?
SARA: Oh, I”m 32.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s kind of when it changes.
SARA: Yea, exactly. I say I’m an old lady, everyone’s like, you’re not an old lady Sara. And I’m like, I know, but compared to you I’m an old lady. I’m not 24.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: In tech we feel old.
SARA: Yeah, seriously. So, you know, that was kind of my thing. I was able to kind of do that. So the four month, it took me four months. I think. I came back in December, like a few days before Christmas. And I was still grump so I kind of ruined Christmas, but i forgive myself. But, yeah, so i came back December 19th and I found a job the third week in April. Almost towards the end of April. I started on April 27th. So it took a while and I think that part of it is, I think I mentioned earlier, in Austin, for whatever reason, all these startups think that they’re going to get senior devs. They’re all, I mean, it’s a limited pool. Again, Austin is like maybe, what, a million people. I don’t know what the population of Austin is, but it’s not huge. It’s not six million like LA or, you know, eight million like New York or whatever. Yeah, Austin is less than a million people. So, but they keep thinking that they’re going to, you know, everyone is holding out for that senior dev and so I’ve seen job postings–like I applied, check this out, I applied to, I saw a job that I applied to earlier this year when I was looking and they’re still looking for this person. So it’s going on a year that they’ve been looking for this person . And you just kind of have to ask yourself, maybe you’re not going to find that person dude.
ANGELA: Yeah, it’s a unicorn. Pretty much. You have to redefine it or something.
SARA: Exactly, something’s got to give. You know, it was really difficult. So, just kind of address your issue; so yeah, I had savings and I was working different contracts and stuff. So I wasn’t making money, but at a certain point I wasn’t losing a whole bunch of money. That being said, the balance still was going down instead of up.
ANGELA: Sure.
SARA: And I got, I mean, I, so I put, I told them this story. I literally got to the point where I said, okay, well, I can’t find a software job. I’ve tried, you know. I tried my best. It’s not going to happen for me. But I’m not going to give up. I just need to get a day job and I’m going to support my software habit, you know, and I’m going to see how, I’m going to still do this. And so I literally, again, I didn’t give up in a really sad, dramatic way, but I had just practically speaking said hey I need income, so I started applying to these content marketing, digital marketing jobs and, girl, like wildfire people would be calling me back. People were dying to hire me, because I’m so good at that stuff and I have ten years experience doing that.
PAIGE: You’re a unicorn.
SARA: Yeah, exactly. I am the unicorn. So I was literally, the day I got my first job offer I was going to have job interviews for these content jobs, and then I had to cancel them because I had got the offers. And so that was kind of where I was at. I thought, hey, you know what, I’m not going to give up on this dream, but I have to be realistic about these parameters. And so there is that. You know, like I said, I was getting a little bit nervous about the balance of my savings so, and then I think as far as the emotional stuff, I’m not going to lie. I mean, I gained weight during the bootcamp because I was working out regularly and I just had to sit there for like, you know, 14, 15 hours a day I was just sitting.
ANGELA: Yep.
SARA: The closest, the best I could do is go for a walk around the block. And so I gained weight. And I was like, great, so I’ve gained weight, I don’t have a job, nobody hires me, nobody likes me.
ANGELA: Your savings is going down.
SARA: My savings is going down. It was depressing. It sucked.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: And that’s, you know, I think what I, you know, I was telling my friends recently, you know, I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I know myself as a well rounded person, the good and the bad things. And I said one thing that I really like about myself, and I don’t think that this is because I’m an extraordinary person, it’s just the way that I am, is i bounce back. Sometimes it takes me a few years after whatever, the ups and downs of life, but I always bounce back eventually. And so, you know, I kind of knew that. Even when I was having bad days. And like, Sara, you’re going to get there, you always do. And I think the other thing is, I have worked in environments that were like sexist. I just was like, I am not going to let these bastards get me down.
PAIGE: Right on. That’s the attitude you’ve got to have about anything, really.
SARA: Like hell no. So that was another thing. So, yeah, and then that’s actually kind of where the Women Who Code came into the picture. I was sitting at home feeling all like, oh nobody likes me. I’ll never be a software developer. All feeling sorry for myself and pathetic. And I thought, you know what Sara, you need to get out of this house and you need to go talk to some other human beings, because I was working from home. I said, you need to go out and you need to meet people, because you can’t keep hanging out with yourself only anymore.
ANGELA: Hanging out with yourself.
SARA: So I went to my first Women Who Code event. It was a Tech Talk and it was okay. I wasn’t like super impressed by it. But then I went to another one and that’s when I met some cool people, I heard some great stories, I met Holly the founder of Women Who Code Austin and Trisha the other co-director of Women Who Code Austin. I felt good being there, because I thought, hey, you know, other people had struggles. I’m struggling. It’s not me. You know, I talked to Holly. I said hey this is great. I would love to be involved. Like, I mean, just off the top of my head I didn’t know how I was going to help, but I can tweet. I do digital marketing. I can help you with that. Can I help you with that? She’s like great. So that same day, that same night I got on, hopped on the Women Who Code Austin Twitter and I started living tweeting the lighting talks and after that I said, hey I’m looking for a job, like I’d love any help you can give me. Also, let me know how I can help. That was in February. And so, you know, kind of what happened from there was I really kind of started focusing on the Twitter account and really kind of stepped up the Women Who Code Austin messaging on Twitter and really cool stuff started happening. We started getting more sponsors. We started getting more members in the Women Who Code meetup. We started being able to have panels. We had a panel about women in technology. It’s been really great. And then I had this idea. I said, hey, you know, we have all of these women who are coming who want to work in technology but they don’t have portfolio. We should have, like a portfolio hackathon. And we should say, we’re going to focus on women and we’re going to focus on diversity, because nobody else in this town is focusing on diversity. We’re the ones. We are going to be the change that we seek, right. So it was a great idea and then randomly started having conversations with some of the ladies that work over at Capital Factory, which is an accelerator here in town. And they said, hey we would love to host you for your hackathon. And we can find you a happy hour sponsor. And I said, sure, great, let me know the dates. They’re like in three weeks. So we had a quick pow-wow with the Women Who Code ladies and we said you guys want to do this in three weeks. So we did. In three weeks, you know, we all kind of, we got sponsorship moneys. We got the messaging out. We had people help us invite their members. And we had, what, some person said it at their happy hour it was like the most diverse group of tech people they’d ever seen in Austin. And we had like 90 people show up to participate-
PAIGE: Wow.
SARA: -in the hackathon. We had a Ruby workshop. She had an IBM Bluemix workshop. I mean, i think next year we definitely want to try to have more workshops for beginners, but it was just such a cool event. I literally, girl, I showed up Saturday morning, because Friday night we had the happy hour, so I was all stressed out and tired. We got on TV, was interviewed by the local ABC affiliate, which is super cool.
PAIGE: Oh, that’s super cool.
SARA: And so by the time I got home I was just wiped out. So I wake up Saturday morning at like 8:00 and I’m like why is this happening to me. But I get to the Capital Factory and I’m just barely awake and I look and I”m like what are all these people doing here? I was really shocked that so many people showed up that early on a Saturday and it was great. So, after that, you know, Holly spoke to the Women Who Code organization and Trisha and myself became co-directors of Women Who Code Austin and so it’s just been, that’s something that I would say to folks who are kind of looking for that next job. You know, trying to get their break, catch their break. Go to a Women Who Code event. Start your own event. I mean, I’ve been so impressed. And I’m not like a super new agey person or anything, but we have a nice little group. The Women Who Code organizers and co-directors and volunteers and in the last few months two of them have gotten new jobs making a bunch of money and they’ve been helping the rest of us find jobs, get bigger paychecks. I mean, when we’re all together, we’re so much more powerful than we are when we’re on our own.
PAIGE: That’s exactly the point.
SARA: Yeah, and I’m a true believer. I’m not saying this because, I’m like, girl power, just for the sense of saying it, but, you know-
PAIGE: It’s not even just girl power. It’s any group that comes together with a purpose, with common experience, that’s where you find power. That’s why the majority has power, because they’re already together with a common experience. We can do the same thing.
SARA: Yeah, and it’s been really powerful moment in my life to be–you know, we have a, we call it, what is it called, ladies coding brunch, on Sundays and we get together. A lot of Women Who Code stuff gets done over brunch on Sundays. But, you know, hey I’m working on this project does anybody know Angular, da, da, da. Hey, I”m working on this job application, can you look at my resume, okay let’s go over your LInkedIn profile. It’s just tremendous. We can pull all of our resources together so we have this big pile of resources as opposed to each one of us out there trying to make it happen. And so I have to say, I wasn’t feeling so good about myself. You know, I didn’t have a job, money was going out, I was like overweight, I was just like woe is me. I’m so sad. And then I got these job offers and, it was just the Women Who Code community or whatever really kind of helped me. Like, it was something I could lean on before, while I got to where I wanted to go. So, and Holly started Women Who Code Austin when she was in a bootcamp, when she was here at Makersquare. I mean, she had moved from LA, didn’t know anybody in Austin. She had some health issues and she said, hey, you know what, I need a community. So she started one. And so that’s what I would say. If you don’t have a Women Who Code, you know, check out meetups. You know, I started a JavaScript study group just amongst the people that I know because we’re all trying to better our skills, for example, right? So create a community. Don’t do it by yourself, because that sucks.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can check out the show notes which includes a full transcription over at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Just click on Women’s Tech Radio and scroll down.
PAIGE: You can also hit us up on Twitter, @heywtr, or send us an email at WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post I Am The Unicorn | WTR 46 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at Bilingualism, cancer cell mortality, one smart dog, bringing Mars to Earth, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Path of Destruction: Star Wars: Darth Bane, Book 1

• 2,000 years after KOTOR
• 1,000 years before New Hope
• Before, but general area of Yoda being born (+/- 50 or so)
• Connected to prophesy from Dark Forces Books/Game, dealing directly with Kyle Katarn

Brains and Bilingual Language

• According to new research, individuals who learn two languages at an early age seem to switch back and forth between separate \”sound systems\” for each language
• Previous Ideas on the Brain and Languages
• One idea was that people who speak more than one language have different processing modes for their two languages
• One mode for processing speech in one language and then a mode for processing speech in the other language
• Another view was that bilinguals just adjust to speech variation by calibrating to the unique acoustic properties of each language
• New Research Supports…
• Kalim Gonzales, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona, research supports the first view
• When most people think about the difference in languages they think of the different words and grammar, but at the root of the languages are different sounds
• The Study – Setup
• The study looked at 32 Spanish-English early bilinguals, who had learned their second language before age 8
• Participants were presented with a series of pseudo-words beginning with a \’pa\’ or a \’ba\’ sound and asked to identify which of the two sounds they heard
• \’pa\’ and \’ba\’ sounds exist in both English and Spanish, how those sounds are produced and perceived in the two languages varies subtly
• For example, for English speakers \’ba\’ typically begin to vibrate their vocal chords the moment they open their lips
• Spanish speakers begin vocal cord vibration slightly before they open their lips and produce \’pa\’ in a manner similar to English \’ba.\’
• English-only speakers might, in some cases, confuse the \’ba\’ and \’pa\’ sounds they hear in Spanish
• The Study – Bilingual Participants
• The bilingual participants were divided into two groups. One group was told they would be hearing rare words in Spanish, while the other was told they would be hearing rare words in English
• Both groups heard audio recordings of variations of the same two non real words bafri and pafri
• Both groups heard the same series of words, but for the group told they were hearing Spanish, the ends of the words were pronounced slightly differently, with the \’r\’ getting a Spanish pronunciation
• Participants perceived \’ba\’ and \’pa\’ sounds differently depending on whether they were told they were hearing Spanish words, with the Spanish pronunciation of \’r,\’ or whether they were told they were hearing English words, with the English pronunciation of \’r.\’
• When they put people in \”English mode,\” they actually would act like English speakers, and then if you put them in Spanish mode, they would switch to acting like Spanish speakers
• Hearing the exact same \’ba\’s and \’pa\’s would label them differently depending on the context
• The Study – Bilingual Participants
• When the study was repeated with 32 English monolinguals, participants did not show the same shift in perception
• They labeled \’ba\’ and \’pa\’ sounds the same way regardless of which language they were told they were hearing
• What Does That Mean?
• Difference between the two groups provided the strongest evidence for two sound systems in bilinguals
• This is primarily true for those who learn two languages very young
• If you learn a second language later in life, you usually have a dominant language and then you try to use that sounds system for the other language, which is why you end up having an accent
• Bilinguals who learn two languages early in life learn two separate processing modes, or \”sound systems\”
• One of the reasons it sounds different when you hear someone speaking a different language is because the actual sounds they use are different
• Someone might sound like they have an accent if they learn Spanish first is because their \’pa\’ is like an English \’ba,\’ so when they say a word with \’pa,\’ it will sound like a \’ba\’ to an English monolingual
• Further Reading / In the News
• Study shows how bilinguals switch between languages | MedicalXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Diet Help Makes Cancer Cells Mortal

• New research suggests that a compound abundant in the Mediterranean diet takes away cancer cells\’ \”superpower\” to escape death
• By altering a very specific step in gene regulation, this compound essentially re-educates cancer cells into normal cells that die as scheduled.
• Apigenin
• One way that cancer cells thrive is by inhibiting a process that would cause them to die on a regular cycle that is subject to strict programming
• Researchers, found that a compound in certain plant-based foods, called apigenin, could stop breast cancer cells from inhibiting their own death.
• Parsley, celery and chamomile tea are the most common sources of apigenin, but it is found in many fruits and vegetables
• Through additional experimentation, the team established that apigenin had relationships with proteins that have three specific functions
• Among the most important was a protein called hnRNPA2, which influences the activity of messenger RNA, or mRNA, which contains the instructions needed to produce a specific protein
• Splicing
• The production of mRNA results from the splicing, or modification, of RNA that occurs as part of gene activation, abnormal splicing is the culprit in an estimated 80 percent of all cancers
• In cancer cells, two types of splicing occur when only one would take place in a normal cell – a trick on the cancer cells\’ part to keep them alive and reproducing.
• Researchers observed that apigenin\’s connection to the hnRNPA2 protein restored this single-splice characteristic to breast cancer cells, eliminating the splicing form that inhibited cell death
• This suggests that when splicing is normal, cells die in a programmed way, or become more sensitive to chemotherapeutic drugs.
• Multimedia
• XKCD | Cancer Cells
• Further Reading / In the News
• The compound in the Mediterranean diet that makes cancer cells \’mortal\’ | MedicalXPress.com

Dog Understanding Grammer

• In experiments directed by her owner a 9-year-old border collie has demonstrated a grasp of the basic elements of grammar by responding correctly to commands such as “to ball take Frisbee” and its reverse, “to Frisbee take ball.”
• Word Training
• The dog had previous, extensive training to recognize classes of words including nouns, verbs and prepositions
• Throughout the first three years of the dogs life she was trained to recognize and fetch more than 1,000 objects by name
• Researchers also taught the meaning of different types of words, such as verbs and prepositions and sentence training at age 7
• The dog learned that phrases such as “to Frisbee” meant that she should take whatever was in her mouth to the named object.
• An experimenter would say, for instance, “to ball take Frisbee.” In initial trials, the experimenter pointed at each item while saying its name.
• After several weeks of training, two experiments were conducted
• The Experiments – \’Eyeing the Prize\’
• In one experiment the dog had to choose an object from one pair to carry to an object from the other pair
• Researchers read commands that included words for those objects. Only some of those words had been used during sentence training
• To see whether Chaser grasped that grammar could be used flexibly student also read sentences in the reversed form of “take sugar to decoy.”
• In 28 of 40 attempts, the dog grabbed the correct item in her mouth and dropped it next to the correct target.
• The Experiments – Hidden in Plain Sight
• Another experiment tested the dogs ability to understand commands when she couldn’t see the objects at first
• Researchers placed two objects behind her at the other end of the bed, after hearing a command, the dog turned around and nabbed one of the objects.
• Then ran to the living room and delivered the item to one of another pair of objects. She succeeded on all 12 trials
• What is Exactly Happening
• Exactly how the dog gained her command of grammar is unclear although researchers suspects that she first mentally linked each of two nouns she heard in a sentence to objects in her memory
• Multimedia
• Chaser – The intelligent Border Collie | PetfansDotnet
• Further Reading / In the News
• Dog sniffs out grammar | Psychology | Science News

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

A Year on Mars, on Earth

• The Mars Society has just announced a year long simulation of astronauts on Mars in the arctic
• The proposed Mars Arctic 365 (MA365) mission on Canada’s Devon Island would take place at Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station
• According to the Mars Society the arctic is a lot like Mars in that it is cold, isolated, and dangerous
• The society is asking for $50,000 from supporters in the next 24 days before starting the first phase (basically retrofitting the station and adding equipment) in July
• More information on MA365 – perhaps with information on crew selection – should come in August, when members of the Phase 1 crew issue a report at the 16th Annual International Mars Society Convention
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Society Proposes A Year-Long Arctic Mission To Better Prepare for the Red Planet | UniverseToday.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Kepler Strategies

• What\’s the Latest?
• Kepler engineers are now strategizing about how to remotely repair one of two broken reaction wheels that precisely point the telescope
• It will take at least several weeks before they beam commands up to the $600-million telescope, and they admit that a fix is a long shot.
• Kepler Exoplanet History
• When Kepler was launched into space astronomers knew that the galaxy contained at least 350 exoplanets, nearly all of them the size of Jupiter or larger
• Kepler’s then spent four years adding nearly 3,000 planets
• Now astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of planets, roughly one for every star, with at least 17 billion of them Earth-sized
• Kepler’s main goal was to determine the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy while they now have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, determining a more exact number will remain in limbo unless the telescope comes back online
• What\’s the Next Mission
• NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, is scheduled for a 2017 launch
• Whereas Kepler has fixed its gaze on distant stars, TESS will focus on bright, nearby stars so that powerful telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of planets that TESS discovers
• While less sensitive than Kepler, will nonetheless uncover plenty of planets in our neighborhood, including a handful of Earth-sized worlds
• Astronomers hope to pair size measurements of planets observed by telescopes such as TESS with mass readings from ground-based scopes that look for subtle wobbles in stars’ motion caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Gone perhaps, but Kepler won\’t soon be forgotten | Atom & Cosmos | Science News

Opportunity, Still Hard at Work

• Opportunity, has just discovered the strongest evidence to date for an environment favorable to ancient Martian biology
• Opportunity’s analysis of a new rock target named “Esperance” confirmed that it is composed of a “clay that had been intensely altered by relatively neutral pH water
• Esperance is unlike any rock previously investigated by Opportunity; containing far more aluminum and silica which is indicative of clay minerals and lower levels of calcium and iron.
• Most, but not all of the rocks inspected to date by Opportunity were formed in an environment of highly acidic water
• This represents the most favorable conditions for biology that Opportunity has yet seen in the rock histories it has encountered
• Water that moved through fractures during this rock’s history would have provided more favorable conditions for biology than any other wet environment recorded in rocks Opportunity has seen
• Opportunity accomplished the ground breaking new discovery by exposing the interior of Esperance with her still functioning Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) and examining a pristine patch using the microscopic camera and X-Ray spectrometer on the end of her 3 foot long robotic arm.
• This discovery comes at the conclusion of a 20 month long science expedition circling around a low ridge called “Cape York,” the team even committed several weeks to getting this one measurement of it
• Esperance stems from a time when the Red Planet was far warmer and wetter billions of years ago.
• What’s so special about Esperance is that there was enough water not only for reactions that produced clay minerals, but also enough to flush out ions set loose by those reactions
• Opportunity can clearly see the alterations caused by that process
• Further Reading / In the News
• Opportunity Discovers Clays Favorable to Martian Biology and Sets Sail for Motherlode of New Clues | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Self-Portrait
• This self-portrait of NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover\’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013)
• In addition three exposures were taken during Sol 270 (May 10, 2013) to update the appearance of part of the ground beside the rover
• The updated area, which is in the lower left quadrant of the image, shows gray-powder and two holes where Curiosity used its drill on the rock target \”John Klein.\”
• The rover\’s robotic arm is not visible in the mosaic. MAHLI, which took the component images for this mosaic, is mounted on a turret at the end of the arm.
• Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic\’s component images. The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images, or portions of images, used in the mosaic
• Radiation Reading Findings
• Announcement coming on Thurs, May 30
  Multimedia
• May\’s Planet Dance | SkyandTelescope
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Updated Curiosity Self-Portrait at \’John Klein\’ | mars.jpl.NASA.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• May 25, 2011 : 2 years ago : SciByte 1 : After appearing on a few shows on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, most specifically after doing \”Space Wednesday\’s\” on Jupiter@Night, Heather (chatroom handle : Mars_Base) started doing a science based show with Jeremy. The show had a short hiatus between SciByte 16 and 17, leading to a change in style and co-host, Chris. Throughout it\’s life the show has been about spreading science information, and in general making Science Happy.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Venus and Jupiter remain close to each other in the NW

• Saturn | Twilight | Look to the SE for Saturn with Spica to it\’s upper right. It will be at it\’s highest point not long after dark

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Bilingualism & A Smart Dog | SciByte 95 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.