Girl Develop It Philly turns one year old this month, and founder Yasmine Mustafa has been hard at work organizing a kick ass party on Thursday, Sept. 27 at
SEER Interactive in Northern Liberties.
"We're going with a nerd theme and we'll have a photo booth, a tattoo artist making geeky temporary tattoos, a scavenger hunt, nerd glasses to give out at the door, candy, food, liquor and beer, of course," says Mustafa. The winner of the nerdiest costume gets a free GDI class. The event, says Mustafa, is not just a celebration of GDI, but also of the city's burgeoning female-centric tech community, with award winning organizations like
TechGirlz and
Girl Geek Dinners. TechGirlz, in fact, will share in the proceeds from the GDI raffle.
Mustafa is thrilled with the number of sponsors who have stepped forward to provide over $3,000 in prizes for the raffle, with a list that includes Rackspace, Treehouse, Wildbit, Indyhall, ThinkGeek, and O'Reilly Media all donating goods and services. "We already have enough sponsors, so we're asking companies that want to come on board to provide funding for an unemployed woman to take a class."
Girl Develop It Philly has grown enormously since inception, launching 12 classes and over 2 dozen Meetups with 400 members, with the goal of increasing technical literacy among women. The GDI Meetup counts over 560 members in its ranks. Mustafa won top prize for her presentation about GDI at ignite Philly 9.
Mustafa seeks to vanquish the intimidation factor in the developer community, which she cites as about 90% male. GDI's classes include both basic and advanced topics, like server side programming, the ins and outs of Wordpress, intro to HTML and JavaScript for non-programmers.
Girl Develop It Philly is part of a larger international organization with six chapters including New York, San Francisco, Ottawa and Sydney, and over a thousand participants.
Source: Yasmine Mustafa, Girl Develop It Philly
Writer: Sue Spolan