natasham25

"Mr. Example shares a photo of his delicious food, Best Buddy shows off his coffee and Miss Hotty shares a photo of her lingerie laying on her bed and a body shot in a changing room. "

Wow! I did not get to that screen, but that's seriously disturbing. Thanks for posting. Surprised none of the mentors at YC mentioned this to them.

Good point - I wish I had the confidence back then to say something. Instead, I just left and never went back. A few months later, I switched to iOS.

> But let me ask when, if ever, your sister will be able to leave that sequestered environment and enter the real world. Isn't it our goal to take down these barriers and achieve gender equality?

Keep in mind this will be her first experience actually programming. I created an iOS app with her - she drew everything an did the voice overs - but hasn't programmed at all.

I want her to get so excited about coding and making something, that she sticks with it. If she's scared away by her first experience, as many women are, there will continue to be a pretty big inequality in tech.

That's why programs like these are so important. I stick with it because I LOVE what I do now and have the confidence and knowledge to stand up to my coworkers, etc - but it took a lot to get to this point. Having safe support in the early stages is critical.

> I know a secret that I'm going to reveal to you -- that works for men too. But it has the unfortunate side effect of making men intolerant of the presence of women. Do you want that outcome for women?

I work with men all day. I also go to meetups where there are men - going to one tonight b/c there is a great speaker and I will not miss out on the opportunity only because there are men at the meetup. Also going to a tech conference later this month, where there will be men.

However, going to these events takes a lot of effort and work for me - I have to deal with people not taking me seriously, guys potentially hitting on me, having to prove myself, etc. Would be great if guys made some effort too, but most don't. I can only tolerate so much of it.

That said, again, if there is a safe space for women to learn together and discuss issues they're facing, they're more likely to stay in the industry, which makes a more equal society of women and men. And as more women work with men in tech as programmers, the more men learn to tolerate and work with women. As more women are supported by other women, we will venture out and go to the normal meetups, but the women who code meetups are a great safe environment to get started with and keep as a support network throughout our careers.

I got my little sister - almost 15 - to apply for this program. It's important for me that she has a very safe and welcoming environment to get excited about coding - since this will be her introduction to it. I feel like having 15-16 year old boys in the program would be very distracting and counterproductive for her.

This is from experience. I'm a woman who codes, and I mostly go to the women who code meetups because I can learn in a safe space that I personally enjoy.

The first time I went to a normal Rails meetup - with majority guys - there were two guys having a pissing contest about whether ERB is better than HAML, and then another guy was apologizing to me for the two guys being "so technical".

In meetups where there are only women, we get to actually learn and support each other, and it's great. I want the same environment for my sister to learn in.

Yep, just like I suspected. Been on there for 10 minutes, and already getting friend requests from creepy guys I've never heard of. I would only use this with close friends.

I like the concept, and event want to use this, but maybe you can have more thought put in to the example friends. I do not categorize my friends as Mr. Example, Miss Hotty, and Best Buddy....especially as a woman. The Miss Hotty is especially creepy - you want guys to send pings to just hot girls? This feels like harassment.

It was a very similar application to the Startup School application.

Thanks YC for putting this conference together. It was seriously the best conference I've ever been to.

The talks were real and gave honest and practical advice we could all relate to. The audience was incredible. Everyone I talked to was a founder and / or engineer. I haven't been at an event with so many impressive women in one room!

We got a glimpse of what a world with a lot more female founders would look like, and it's going to be better than I could have imagined.

KVO is built-in to iOS, but it has some serious issues. One BIG issue is that you have to register to observe a key in order to de-register from it later. If you never register for the key (because it is dynamic for example), and try to de-register, the app will crash. It's a pretty big issue, and this seems to handle it in a pretty elegant way.

I've been coding for only a little over 2.5 years, and especially agree with the point on learning technologies that are significantly different from what you're comfortable with. I started by learning Java to understand programming fundamentals, which made Ruby pretty easy to learn.

I then learned Ruby on Rails, which I thought was a bunch of "magic" until I started learning iOS development. A lot of the Ruby on Rails architecture concepts were very useful in figuring out how to architect my iOS application. Knowing some Java was also super helpful, since Objective-C is a strongly typed language. Learning iOS helped me understand both Rails and iOS better, and why people didn't like Rails. I also feel a lot more comfortable picking up JavaScript frameworks, such as Backbone.js and Angular.js, which were harder for me to understand and pick up when I was just doing Rails.

Next up, I'll be learning a little bit of Android development, hoping to learn the different philosophies for mobile and how to better structure my layouts for different devices, and will probably learn a bunch of other things I can't even think of right now!

Working with amazing engineers who are open to mentoring me has also been priceless.