mnavada

I attended the conference. Being "non-technical" doesn't mean you're doing less important or less challenging work. You're part of a team, and you should be proud of it.

My husband and I have a startup. Yes, he is the technical side of the team. As the CEO, I mainly shape the vision for the product, strategize on how we grow, and am in charge of marketing. When we discuss our technical strategies, learning how to code is not enough. The vision for the company guides the technical decisions.

Just because I don't sit and code our product also doesn't mean that I'm clueless about the major tech decisions we make. For example, in choosing whether or not to build our products with PHP or Python, I had to learn the pros and cons of each language, and then we made the decisions together. BTW, Python it is :)

During the talk, there was a push to have more girls who code. And rightly so, since women are grossly underrepresented. But for now, I actually think that it's great to have women who have the confidence to found companies without being technical. As Kathryn from The Muse explained, Alex, her co-founder learned how to code. Necessity is the mother of invention.

As for what I got out of the conference, in brief, I learned that the talks I loved were the ones where the founder was humble and matter-of-fact.

I agree, or you lose hope in the process. You're not going to get a reply the first time or even the 100th time, but if you believe that it works and keep modifying your approach in the email, it can work. I've tried sending cold emails and I got a reply after the 12th time. I try to tailor the email to each person. It's more time consuming and I can't send them as often as I want, but I find this more effective.

We recently secured a small investment from an angel investor without prior connections. Having graduated from an Ivy League 12 years ago, I realized that more than school affiliation, it was our team, product, vision, and perseverance that made a difference. I used to regret not networking more in school, but quickly realized that in the startup world, you have to be a problem solver. No time for regrets or to crib about the present. Thanks for this article. I'm going to distribute this to my team.

Aaawww, this reply made me very emotional, in a good way :) It's great to know that I'm not alone in this frustration. I understand that sometimes it's not always the teachers, it's also administration, and the students. I currently teach a large 3 hour lecture hall at night (6 PM to 10 PM). No matter how I try to be entertaining or make the class more engaging, half the class is on the phone or about to sleep :( But I can't blame them. The 3 hour lecture format is antiquated.

Congrats on the career change, engineering fellowship, and the courage to learn something new! I'm not surprised it didn't take you only a few months to learn. With patience and love for what you do, anything is possible. You're very inspiring!

I know HTML and CSS, and I would love to learn Python and JavaScript. Chalktips was written in Python, and MagTag. My husband is the CTO and he wrote all the code. Just two married couple wanting to build tech tools :)