Volunteer-led organisation codebar runs regular, free coding workshops that aim to diversify the tech industry. Local developers volunteer as coaches, and women, minority ethnic groups and members of the LGBT+ community come along to learn whatever takes their tech fancy. Workshops run monthly in Oxford, and on 26th September, Oxford Computer Consultants hosted one at our new St Aldates offices.
Attendees mingled over food, then the event kicked off with a welcome presentation, followed by a lightning talk from Reynold, OCC Director of Innovation Delivery, on ‘Morita and Sticky Situations’. This was a good reminder of how important interactions with people are to coding, and a great combination with the workshop.
After topping up on drinks and food, people were then paired up and set to work on learning! There was a wide variety of topics at this event: students learning Python and JavaScript and some complete beginners who had never coded before.
The learning in action
Alllllll the learning going on 🙂 @OxfordCC pic.twitter.com/T0dvfDf8KI
— codebar Oxford (@codebarOxford) September 26, 2017
Several OCC staff members took part in the event. Our front end team lead Alex, a codebar regular, helped set up the event and also volunteered as a JavaScript coach. Will, one of our software developers, volunteered as a coach and taught a student how to build her first HTML and CSS website. Another of our front end developers, Beverley, is a codebar organiser and facilitated the event.
After 1.5 hours of coaching, everyone was pretty worn out, both students and coaches! So we finished off the last of the food, tidied up and headed home to digest all the things that we learnt.
Rupal, one of the attendees, had some great feedback on the event:
“I found codebar to be a very enjoyable event! I am a complete beginner in this area, so it was great to have so many knowledgeable coaches available who clearly have a passion for programming. I definitely learnt a lot from this workshop and would recommend it to anyone.”
We really enjoyed hosting codebar Oxford and look forward to welcoming them back into our offices in the near future.
If you would like to get involved with codebar as either a student or a coach, get in touch with codebar Oxford on oxford@codebar.io and sign up for event invites on their website at codebar.io/oxford.