This past Saturday Susan, our daughter Katie and I (with help from our son Michael) taught a one day computer bootcamp for women at Cornell. Susan, who is  a Cornell alum, had come up with the idea a few months earlier as she noticed how many more male than female students showed up at hackathons. Ami Stuart who organizes tech events for Cornell liked the idea and did an amazing job pulling together the actual event which wound up being sponsored by both Ziggeo (Susan’s company) and Accenture.

The goal for the day was to provide exposure to a wide set of topics, including how the web works, using the command line, using an editor to change html and css files, a bit of javascript and publishing everything using both github pages and a server. We had asked the students to do some pre-work including signing up for github, registering a domain, and installing Firefox, git and Atom on their laptops.

If all of this sounds a bit too ambitious to you that would be right, although not by much as it turns out. We had a full day from 9am to 5pm with only a 1 hour bio break and managed to get through most of our program. We cut the parts on Javascript a bit short and in the end only a few students could access their own servers. Nearly everyone though was able to publish the beginnings of their own site via github pages.

If you are wondering where the name “Learn To Commit” comes from then you probably should take the bootcamp. We put all the materials online.  As Susan wrote in her post about the event, we are thinking of repeating this at other schools, so if this is of interest to you, please contact us.