Team profile: Patricia Garcia, Superdesk Developer
Patricia Garcia is one of our newest developers. Her first project involves experimenting with new, visually engaging output for Live Blog. She told us that she sees a number of valuable extensions for Live Blog and that the visual component is just one way the software proves its versatility. Learn more about the Live Blog 2.0 beta release here.
Patricia started coding at the age of seven. As a child she made simple games in Basic, and her early interest in software development stuck with her.
Patricia says she was also lucky that her university program reached a 50/50 gender balance by the end of her course at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. "I have never really been treated differently for being a woman. But from what I know things are not so easy elsewhere," she says.
It is no secret that women coders are few and far between. While the conversation in the media has started and many girl coder communities are popping up all over the world, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Patricia thinks one of the main deterrents is cultural conditioning. Early exposure to coding may also be a good way to change these statistics for the better in the future. If we expose both boys and girls to coding, "they will be accustomed to learning these skills together and won't find it strange working together when they are older."
One such effort is the Year of Code, a non-profit campaign to encourage people to code for the first time. It's especially good for teaching coding to women and girls, as this Guardian article explains. The campaign is having real results; this year, the UK will introduce mandatory coding to school curricula on a national level.
"If you teach kids to code or play with hardware or any science topic, there is a good chance they'll consider studying something scientific when they grow older." Patricia says "We tend to forget how fast they can learn. With kids you teach them something easy and often they end up doing something much more complicated."