Women Techmakers Kuwait completes second workshop
The Women Techmakers (WTM) group held a web development workshop for beginners on the period from 25 Nov till 13th of Dec, 2017 for beginners. The workshop took place at the Promenade Cultural Center in collaboration with the Information Science ClickIT club from Kuwait University, Arab Women in Computing and the Promenade Cultural Center. 50 participants fulfilled the 12-hour workshop requirements, of whom 84% were women. The attendees of the workshop were from varied backgrounds either students, IT professionals mainly engineers or computer scientists, biologists, other scientists as well as retired women successfully completed the workshop. The highlight of the workshop featured the introduction of participants to three new programming, modeling, bootstrap and web hosting at a beginners level.
Women Tech-makers mission is to drive developer success and contribute towards a healthy technology ecosystem in Kuwait. The target technologies involved include Google tech from Android, Chrome, Drive, Google Cloud platforms and API’s like Cast API, Maps API, and YouTube API. Dr. AlMeraj then highlighted that by becoming a member, both women and men have access to multiple Google and Udacity scholarships and certifications. The yearlong events by WTM were then listed these included two programming training workshops (Android study Jams for beginners), and an International Women’s Day conference event and Hackathon competition on 8 March 2018. Dr. AlMeraj stressed the importance of diversity and equal representation of women in higher-level tech positions to drive performance and innovation.
The Website Development workshop covered topics mainly on “how to be a programmer”, “build your own website”, “and learn the latest programming SDK” and “basic programming commands HTML, CSS and javaScript”. The event started with an introduction on the Women Techmakers / Google and Google Developer Group by Ms Latifa (KU ISC ClickIT Club member), followed by a discussion on the importance of empowering women in technology through creating a community, and prompting visibility and resources. The sessions included topics like “how to be a programmer” and “CSS” by Ms Alfaresi; “Intro to HTML and SDK” by Dr Al-Hilal; and “Intro to Javascript, bootstrap and hosting” Engr. Saqiba Sulaiman.
The speaker bio are as follows: Sundus Alfaresi is a specialist in computer science and a certified programmer from IBM and ITIL, Eng Saqiba Sulaiman is an online Information systems professional with more than nine years experience in web development and management, and Dr Maryam AlHilal is a PhD graduate in Nutrition and Full Stack Web Developer (Python, Django, Java Script, HTML5, CSS3, Intro to Swift).
On the last day of the workshop, the participants presented their website project to the audience in the presence of the judges and three winners were announced. The judges were two external, Ms Arwa Aljaser and Mr Ayoob K, and one internal, Ms Sundus Alfaresi. Ms Arwa Aljaser is a business graduate in finance and currently working as full stack developer. She has three years’ experience in web development in Python, Django, HTML, CSS, Laravel, PHP and JavaScript. She has developed three websites and worked as full time developer at “Ajar”. Mr Ayoob K is the Founder and Director of Emstell Technology Consulting. He is a certified project management specialist with over 13 years of experience in Middle East, Europe and North America in implementing IT Solutions for large and small enterprises in various domains. Ayoob is active in the startup circles in Kuwait and GCC offering technical consultation and mentoring.