Coding Grace's Nov/Dec Newsletter

❄️ As the end of the year draws near, this is our final newsletter of 2023. A big thanks to everyone who stuck with us as we tried different things with the newsletter. Let’s see what other events are happening for the rest of the year before we all break off for the festive season. 🎄

🤳 We are still on birdsite, but here’s a reminder that we are also on 🐘 mastodon.ie/@codinggrace

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It’s been a busy couple of months and it was great to be involved or attend in-person events. The weather will try its best to keep us at home, but I am so happy that people do go and support their local tech community meetups. It’s been tough to get back up and going and building the community since covid (it seems so long ago and yet it has caused a huge impact on social activities). And that’s a segue to some updates on what’s been happening with Coding Grace and friends of late.

Mick and I ran a ALT.CTRL.GameCraft workshop as part of Beta Festival; the participants designed and made their own custom game controller with no coding or experience required.

We hope to run a similar one in the latter part of next year, so keep your eyes peeled if you are curious and interested. We learnt so much in organising this as the PCB board was custom designed by Mick, and I certainly practiced my soldering skills with all those buttons. 😆

And check out Beta Festival, their exhibition ends on November 19th.

It was great to be back at PyCon Ireland (as an attendee), seeing familiar faces from PyConIE’s past, and many new faces, which is fantastic.

It’s especially heartening to see people responding to a plea by PyCon Ireland Chair at the opening and closing of the conference, there was a queue of folks talking to organisers afterwards wanting to get involved.

A special thanks to Steven Holden (who have given me amazing support and advice when I was running PyCon Ireland in the earlier days) on why community is important. So are we a “just a bunch of consumers”?

PyLadies Dublin celebrated its 10th Anniversary last month, 🎉

And we are also delighted to be involved and helping the global online PyLadies conference, PyLadiesCon.

PyLadiesCon just announced both the programme and tickets are live, and yes - that’s right… over 3 days from America to EMEA and APAC!

And I want to say congrats to all the Diversity in Tech Awards nominees and winners which took place at the end of Sept. And I was humbled to be one of the judges, so many talented and amazing people, you are all winners. 🤩

👏 Also well done to the new cohort for SHEGENERATE that just kicked off. Wishing all the founders the very best of luck.

Our friends from the TechFoundHer community have also been quite busy, and they have another upcoming bookclub on Dec 4 as well as a special online Meet the Founder event with Christine Nsubuga Noonan on Nov 30th.

And finally the big comeback event this year for us to be part of is the Irish Techie Charity Quiz, bringing together as many of the Irish Tech community groups under one roof, meet each other, have some end of year fun and raising money for not one but four charities this year! 🙌

It’s completely free (but you need to register), there’s prizes to be won.

If you are a tech community organiser, there’s still time to be one of our community partners, the only ask is to help use spread the word to your community and come along to this year’s meetup of meetups! Interested? Drop us an email at info@codinggrace.com.

🌈 A round up of Diversity in Tech groups around Ireland, because of Covid, many are inactive or trying to restart. I kept many of the groups on the list and only removed them as I see their meetup groups disappear. 😢
But… It’s not all bad news, new groups have sprung up this year as well - 7 groups, in fact! 🎉

• Black Girls in Tech Ireland
• Black Women in Tech Ireland
• HackHers Dublin
• Latinas in Tech - Dublin
• SheStrategizes: Women in Marketing Meetup (Dublin Chapter)
• Tech and Inclusion Advocates Ireland
• Women in Tech Academy

So let’s hope 2024 will see many more groups active, and if I am missing any diversity in tech groups in Ireland, or there’s a mistake, please let me know.

📚 Any interesting reads and recommendations? Useful tech resources? Interesting videos or podcasts? Let us know.

SPONSOR: fourTheorem

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❤️ Thanks to Symantec and All the Tech Things for sponsoring Pi-Tops v2. We now have 4 in total for our events and collaborations.

🌈 Dublin City PPN - Community Partner, we are also members.

🌈 For our long time supporters and those who contributed recently, thank you on behalf of the team.

💖 If you want to be involved with Coding Grace, there are different ways from offering to mentoring 🧑‍🏫, collaborating 🤝, help spreading the word about us 💬, and financial contributions 🤲.

🙏 And a huge thanks to our regular Open Collective contributors. 🙏

More ways to help us:- Open Collective | Patreon | ko-fi

📍 Where have I’ve been (remotely) last 2 month & recently?

• Sep 12: Attending TechFoundHer Lunch & Learn - Law for Start-ups @ Mason Hayes Curran
• Sep 23: Co-Hosting Cork Game Jam
• Sep 19: Hosting PyLadies Dublin Sep Meetup @ Stripe
• Oct 1: Attended EuroPython Society AGM (Online)
• Oct 17: Hosted PyLadies Dublin Oct Meetup @ Phorest Salon
• Nov 11-12: Attended PyCon Ireland

📍 Where am I this month & next?

☕️ It’s going to be quiet for me, so mainly it will be only 1 event I’ll be at before the year is out.

• Nov 21: Hosting PyLadies Dublin Nov Meetup @ Udemy
• Nov 30: Season’s Geekings: Irish Tech Community Charity Quiz @ Workday

Awaken Angels

AwakenHub wants to democratise the investor landscape for women investors and founders across Ireland by establishing a women founded community with predominantly women investors supporting women led startups across the island of Ireland. Interested? Check out their site to see how you can register your interest to be an angel investor or as a potential early stage founder looking to raise pre-seed investment.

🎤 Let us know if you are looking for speakers or know of amazing events/confs that are looking for guest speakers.

📢 GDG Dublin - Looking for Media Person

GDG Dublin are looking for a volunteer who can help click photographs and make and edit videos for Devfest Ireland event.

Please forward some portfolio images and videos to gdgdublin@gmail.com.

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📢 PyLadies Call for Speakers

Normally on the 3rd Tue every month either in-person or remote.

Topics (Python-related or Python adjacent) can include: Core Python, creative tech, testing, career, libraries, all things data, frontend, backend, SRE, etc.

ℹ️ Here are some diversity in tech events based in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Let us know if there’s any upcoming events we can list in our next newsletter or in diversityintech.fyi/events.

(In-Person) PyLadies Dublin November Meetup (Talk and Workshop) @ Udemy

• Wed Nov 15, 2023 (18:30)

(Hybrid) CWIT Tech Starter: Tearing Up The Script @ IBM

• Wed Nov 22, 2023 (16:00)

(Online) TechFoundHer: Tales of the City. Meet the Founder - Christine Nsubuga Noonan

• Thu Nov 30, 2023 (13:00)

(In-Person) Season's Geekings! - The Techie Charity Quiz @ Workday

• Thu Nov 30, 2023 (18:30)

(In-Person) Her+Data: Amazing Data Women - Nov 2023 @ Stripe

• Thu Nov 30, 2023 (18:30)

(Online) TechFoundHer Book Club: The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A Farahany

• Mon Dec 4, 2023 (19:00)

(Online) AwakenHub Christmas Jollies: Save The Date

• Tue Dec 12, 2023 (17:00)

(In-Person) Women Techmakers Belfast 2024 Launch!

• Wed Jan 17, 2024 (18:00)

🌈 If you want to add an event, you can submit a PR or or an issue on github, Or you can email me at contact@codinggrace.com.

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💖 I would like to say thank you to everyone who have supported us by subscribing to this newsletter, spread word about what we do, collaborate with us, donated money, it has been amazing! On behalf of Coding Grace team, thank you and the community so, so much for all your support.

🤩 We are working on a new project next year, and we hope to announce it after the holidays.

⏭️ Our next bi-monthly newsletter will be in Jan 2024, if you have announcements, events, opportunities for our Jan-Feb Newsletter, drop us an email at contact@codinggrace.com.

Cheers,

/// Vicky 🐱🏳️‍🌈🦄