In this session, Heather will share lessons learned from three years of teaching people how to code - first through founding the Canadian not-for-profit Ladies Learning Code, and then through running Canada's original programming bootcamp, HackerYou. She'll share stories of lives changed, amazing projects created by relative beginners, as well as the challenges involved in teaching beginners to code, and how to overcome them. You'll leave this session feeling inspired about the next generation of developers, and maybe even motivated to do your part to expose more beginners to the amazing world of creating - not just consuming - technology and the web. It might leave you looking at the junior developers at your company through a new lens.

About Heather Payne

Heather Payne is the CEO of HackerYou, Canada’s original programming bootcamp and to date, the only one of dozens around North America that was founded by women. HackerYou offers Toronto’s best full- and part-time courses for people who want to learn to code. Heather also operates a 7000-square foot digital literacy education facility in the heart of downtown Toronto called The Lab. In 2011, Heather founded Ladies Learning Code, a Canadian not-for-profit organization that runs popular workshops for women (and men, and girls and boys) who want to learn computer programming and other technical skills in a social and collaborative way. Ladies Learning Code now has chapters in over a dozen cities across Canada and a thriving program for youth. In 2012, Heather spent a year working on a project for the Mozilla Foundation: her job was to build a community of people and organizations in Toronto who care about raising youth as creators – not just consumers – of technology and the web. The project was granted $365,000 in funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Heather was an early investor in ShopLocket, and was recently named one of Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women in the Trendsetters & Trailblazers category.

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