Parmita's Blog

Just came back from the amazing event hosted by Nutanix, a data center infrastructure and cloud computing software company.   It was extremely engaging as we started off with a design workshop and competition (My team and I won 2nd place!) We also had an extremely informative speaker panel of women who work at Nutanix which opened my eyes to how varied jobs in the tech industry truly are. Not everyone is a software engineer or coder--people do all sorts of jobs in all segments of a tech company, and it was interesting to see how all the differing roles meshed and interworked to create a whole company. I was also lucky enough to get to talk to the CEO Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix, and he gave some excellent advice about staying motivated and always looking forward. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to attend.

Today I had the awesome experience of getting a tour of the Video Game Dev company, Zynga! It was really fun and engaging. First, we got to play a bunch of arcade and video games (of course!), but after that, I got to see an amazing presentation by Kasey McKenna, a senior software engineer at Zynga. She explained her problem-solving process for a part of the Zynga game, Farmville: Tropic Escape. The task was to animate a boat making a delivery, making sure that it hit certain key points on the way there. With simple code, the boat made sharp, jerky motions, awkwardly arriving at its destination. However, after working through the problem, Kasey applied calculus and parametric curves to simulate the natural smooth curving of the boat’s path.   It was super interesting to see the calculus I learn in school applied in real-life in someone’s actual job! And here's what the finished result looks like: Overall, it was a lot of fun and definitely an e...

Create your own web page! For our final Girls Who Code project, we all created our very own web page! I decided to make mine like a sort of virtual business card with information about me. You can check it out here .

400 likes and counting :) The national Girls Who Code organization regrammed the picture of our club with our guest speaker from Pixar. It was so much fun and I'm glad we could share this moment!

The end of a long journey Camp went amazing! It was a huge success! I feel so happy and invigorated right now. I can’t believe how much of an impact I was able to make! At the very end of camp, parents were asking for my email, contact info, to take a picture with their girl. It means so much to me to have parents come and personally thank me. The entire experience was so amazing and I just felt so important. It makes me so proud to know that I made such an impact on so many people. And we raised over $1400 in donations!!!! Honestly, when we were first starting the camp, I thought I would be happiest when I was finally counting the money! And to tell the truth, I was pretty happy when I was counting the money. It was immense proudness in my achievement! After all, I actually earned this money. Still, that happiness could never match up to the happiness I got when the girls and their parents came up to me, asking for pictures, hugs, and giving thank you cards. That happ...

A little update on how the GWC Summer Camp has gone Our summer camp has been going pretty well so far. The girls are all so amazing. They manage to pick up complex concepts at alarming speeds. One girl had never seen a line of code in her entire life, but now, in just a few days, she understands every single topic we covered perfectly as well as all the challenging concepts I gave her as extra work! They are so incredibly smart, sometimes I forget how young they are! Young children can unwittingly be so funny sometimes. Some of the girls this age have not yet developed a sense of personal boundaries and ask me and the speakers the strangest questions. Yesterday while our speaker, Rod Begbie , was talking about the social changes needed to bring women and minorities into CS fields, one girl cut him off to ask, “Are you married?” He was very tactful though, and answered the question along with the myriad of other questions (some relevant and some not-so-much) that the girls a...

A lot of hard work!  Me and my fellow Girl Who Code officers have decided to hold a Summer Camp for girls in 4th through 6th grade. And of course, as president, this means I have had a lot of work to do. So many things had to be taken care of: How should we advertise and promote publicity? Where can we book a place with 50 computers? When should we hold it--what time and dates? How much should we teach? What topics should we cover? How do we explain these topics to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders? It took a lot of hard work, late nights, and determination, but we've planned nearly everything out! Here's a flyer I designed with my officer team and created on my own (with Photoshop): This was a lot of work! I'm really proud of how much we've accomplished and I will update more on how the camp goes.

Thank you Girls Who Code for everything you've done for me  A while ago I heard an announcement asking all girls interested in computer science to come over to Room 205 during lunch to become part of a club: Girls Who Code!  I didn't really think that much of it then, but Girls Who Code has really changed so much of my life! After I attended a couple meetings, I realized that I really really liked it.  I was already taking a Java class in school, but the male-dominated class always seemed a bit intimidating. Girls Who Code gave me a completely different view of computer programming. Being around other girls like me who have the same passion that I have is really something I'm grateful for.  I got to learn JavaScript (which I now know is completely different from Java) and work with other girls to make cool projects. I got more and more interested in Girls Who Code and the unique environment it provided for me. I liked it so much that I even app...