I wanted to begin my talk by making a confession that I am a total outsider to your community in the sense that I don’t usually code. I wanted to give you a little story to locate me, and how I got to where I am today in being part of this community but from a different perspective.
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I was visiting New York, and I got to see people who were coding who did not look like the people at my startup. Who did not act like the people at my startup. It was a very different program, obviously a lot of artists. That was really interesting to me, and I was like, “Oh. These are atypical developers. Maybe I could be an atypical developer.”
The way that you think about software affects the kinds of things that you can do. Traditionally you would learn computer programming through operating on math, or operating on language, and in order to bring these ideas into the visual arts we decided to build a custom language that allowed people to have visual expressions.
I’m going to tell you a little bit about an organization I run, The Code Liberation Foundation. We teach women to program games for free. We’ve taught over a thousand new woman to be programmers, between the ages of sixteen to sixty.