Chickpea and Yossarian are two of the organisers behind a series of free programming classes for womin being held at Library House, a social centre in south London. They were kind enough to answer some questions about the origins of the project, technicalities and their future plans.

Dandizette
What brought about the women’s programming classes?

CHICKPEA:
It in part resulted from a conversation between me and Yossarian – this was after a dissident island radio show (that I’m a part of). We were sitting in the London Action Resource Centre with electronica blaring in the background and cans of red stripe in hand. At some stage in a long conversation I admitted to Yossarian that I wanted to learn programming but that I had some concerns – like where to start, and how I was alienated by the (often quite) macho vibe that surrounds male-dominated techie situations – and the realisation that all the programmers I know are guys and that in the radical social movements in which I get involved a large majority if not ALL of the people involved in the geeky/techie stuff are guys. That’s all a bit shit IMHO.

Yossarian responded by talking about his experience in teaching programming, and also talked about his experience with the macho attitudes in these classroom settings – and expressed an interest in teaching a womyn-only class. And then the moment of “let’s just fuckin do it!” came out of that.
Several crazy summer months went by and then the class started in mid-October and totally kicks ass.

YOSSARIAN:
It’s been cool to get back to geek teaching – I’ve taught a bit before but not for a long time. Since programming is mainly a male-dominated profession and the overwhelming majority of geeks I deal with in my day job as a programmer are men, I thought it’d be interesting to just get into a different environment. It’s been a good learning opportunity for me.

I was particularly interested in trying to figure out what it is that makes programming such a male-dominated profession, whether it’s general sexism, something going on with the educational system, or a general lack of interest in the subject on the part of women. The answers are not totally clear to me, but one thing we can say is that the level of interest in learning about computers has been overwhelming – with no advertising or outreach at all we had six women willing to haul themselves to a Brixton squat every Monday night for three hours, dual-boot their shiny new computers with Linux, learn about how computers and networks function, and start learning to program.
As an anarchist, I’ve got a responsibility to try and challenge privilege and power in society where I find it, so it was also in some ways a political duty for me to address the sexism that keeps women out of technical professions and social movement tech in particular; and teaching women to geek out seemed to me to be a better response than giving boy geeks a lecture about sexism.

Lastly, as someone who does a lot of coding for political projects, I’ve got a lot of work to do, so the opportunity to train up some new programming talent is hopefully going to work out in my favour – I am hoping to get some useful code out of the crew if they’re interested in working on some projects we’ve already got going!

Dandizette
Why did you decide on Ruby? How have the sessions gone so far?

CHICKPEA:
Sessions have been great, really entertaining and interesting. I really feel like my little universe is expanding every week, that there are possibilities being opened like doors everywhere…the realisation that I can learn the skills to make things for myself (DIY or die!) – which has been the case with other areas but so far hasn’t extended much into the world of how computers work…until now! And that is incredibly empowering. Yossarian makes a point of talking about how things can be used, what functionality certain things have, which is also motivating.

YOSSARIAN:
Ruby or Python seemed like a natural choice, since they’re both expressive, object-oriented, interpreted languages with good standard libraries and what I think are good programming cultures. The obvious question is, “why not PHP?”. PHP is easy to install and use but there’s a lot of shitty code and too many sloppy attitudes for my liking – I find it difficult to take seriously a language which uses a backslash as a namespace separator, for example. For me that design choice is symbolic of a whole set of PHP stupidities which I just couldn’t in good conscience pass on to a group of people who could potentially become good programmers.

Java, C, or C++ require too much messing around with the programming environment to be useful in a once-a-week class – they’re often used in university courses which get thousands of applicants to “weed out the dumb students”, but the goal of this class wasn’t to take 1000 applicants and turn them into 10 units of cubicle-fodder, it was to get a bunch of people together so they could find out whether they would enjoy programming.
So far the classes have gone pretty well, we’ve gone through the basics of object-oriented programming, Ruby, HTTP requests, DNS, html, css, request routing, database tables and fields, and object-relational mapping (all this in six classes!). I don’t think anybody in the class could stand on their own feet yet and just attack a project by themselves, but I think at this point we are ready to maybe switch formats and move from a sort of traditional teacher-student setup to more of a people-hanging-out-working-on-a-project-together setup. We’ll see how it goes.

Dandizette
What’s the setup for the group? Have you hosted these kind of sessions before?

CHICKPEA:
Setup? Monday nights, 7pm, the Library House (a social centre in Camberwell) – we have use a room (which comes complete with tea, a heater, a projector, a big table, lots of chairs) – we sit around with our laptops and geek it up.

Yossarian plugs into the projector so we see his desktop and mainly leads the class but we’re always talking to each other, asking questions, cracking jokes, helping each other out…all class participants, besides Yossarian, are womyn and this is the only stipulation to get involved at this stage.

YOSSARIAN:
Everybody showed up on Monday night at 7, installed Linux on their computers in the first class, and then it was a whirlwind tour of web application building, mostly with me talking while using an LCD projector and madly dashing around helping people to get their programs running. So far we’ve had six classes; like I said above, I think that if we continue in the new year the format will change somewhat. It was the first time we tried anything like this so I’ll be more prepared next time – this one was pretty rough in terms of lack of planning or anticipating problems, if there is a next set of classes I’ll have some ready-made lesson plans and example programs, so it’d be a lot smoother.

Dandizette
Are there plans to run more of these or similar projects you’re involved in?

CHICKPEA:
Heck yea – I hope so! I hope that after this session of classes ends we can all pick up again in the new year, providing people have time/energy/capacity to do so. What form the class will take will probably depend on the people interested…

YOSSARIAN:
It’s unclear at this point what’s going to happen; a friend of mine has been really interested in how things are going and would like to do a similar class focused on server administration (he’s a sysadmin geek). I could easily consider doing another beginner’s class for women if there was interest.

There has also been a lot of interest in the project in both Hacktionlab and London Indymedia circles; one of the inspirations for the class actually came from the training programs run by Brasil Indymedia when they needed a new crop of geeks to run their network infrastructure a few years ago – they educated a whole lot of women, who now run quite a bit of the tech infrastructure for brasil.indymedia.org.