The story of StripeGirls continues

Following the birth of StripeGirls, the epic story continues…

We had our second StripeGirls meetup on the 6th of October at SilverStripe headquarters and a few new faces showed up. We also had a few more StripeGirls register on the page and I'm glad to see the clan growing.

The topics were very different this time. Since we wanted to start coding as soon as possible, we had to have everything installed. Half of our members hadn’t coded before, so there was some intense to-the-vein installation process to follow. In the first part of the meetup, we dealt with all the installation basics: server + PHP + Git + composer. We had to account for all environments (Installation in Windows was something I had nightmares about before the meeting). Luckily one of our StripeGirls had already done the process successfully (yay, team effort) and was able to help others that don't hate Windows yet.

The second part was delicious. Diana taught us Agile using a chocolate elephant. We are Agile here at SilverStripe, so our StripeGirls have to be too (but it’s not like we are brainwashing them or anything). And since we only get together every 3 weeks, there's no point trying to organise something in a non-agile way. Otherwise, we'd never get anything done.

Diana also covered some development steps - we had to assure quality code (like Peer Review and Testing) and hat-wearing website-developing roles, like UX, devs, PMs, POs and a lot of other acronyms. Finally, we brainstormed features we wanted for our site (but we have yet to upload them to Trello).

There’s optional homework this time. There's a repository to play around with git, and another one to upload docs and resources we find useful. The girls will get their git badge in no time (note to self: we should totally have badges).

It's difficult to try and cover everything you need to start before actually writing some code. Since we already know we learn best by doing, it's best just to try and do things. The SilverStripe’s management team have already got Trello and Slack set up, so if any StripeGirl doesn't understand or is having trouble following, we can help her right away. With that in mind, it's important to state rule number 1 of StripeGirls: there are no dumb questions. (You thought I was going to say "no boys allowed"? - well, we are still on the fence with that one.) And the second one is probably "No bricks" - we will try and support all phones except bricks. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to decide rules for the team. I'm gonna put it to a vote and I'll get back to you on this.

In the next meetup, we are going to start building our website - the whole process, from creating a repo to having the SilverStripe basic theme set up. We need to discuss branding and hoodies design before really going live. I will be voting for the chocolate-elephant-in-a-rocket logo.

The upcoming meetup is scheduled for Tuesday, 27 October. So if you are a woman in tech, sign up for this event and be part of our StripeGirls’ epic story.