Who is a programmer?

TL;DR -Everyone pictured is a programmer.

I've been considering the answer to this question even more often lately. As our world is increasingly driven by software, inclusion and participation by more than just 25-35 year old, mostly male nerds, in our algorithm-run world is critical.

Moving Forward

Many years ago, while working full-time at Microsoft, I started worked on this problem of lack of inclusion for developers. At that time I ran the SoCal MSFT Digigirlz program for high school girls for several years. Among many lessons, I learned that working on the lack of diversity problem in high school and focusing only on girls was 'too little, too late.' Middle school was where kids 'opted out' of programming because of lack of access to learning materials and distorted opinions about who could code.

When I left Microsoft to consult full-time, I dreamed of increasing the scope of the work to introduce kids to programming earlier in school. Our team also wanted to normalize coding for all, particularly to have boys and girls coding together. I worked with a team of dedicated and amazing volunteers to build a curriculum for middle school teachers to introduce coding to their kids. It has taken many years to build the Java-based courseware of TKP (Teaching Kids Programming) into a usable state for school teachers (who sometimes use the curriculum to train themselves to code first, then use it in their classrooms). All courseware is FREE and open source.

Winning

For the last few years, I have had the privilege of learning from a number of dedicated middle school STEM teachers who have selected TKPJava for their classrooms. By coordinating the work of Java developers and school teachers, TKP today consists of a full year of core Java lessons - 80 lessons as this writing, also a 100-page written lesson planner and a series of YouTube screencasts for teacher preparation. We've built on the work of Seymour Papert and others to create a kid friendly 'bridge' Java API, to build a pipeline of students who will be really for high school AP Java.

One collaboration has been particularly productive - that of the dedicated teachers in the Moreno Valley, CA public Middle School STEAM academy for 6th-8th graders and our volunteer group. The collaboration is capped off by the year end class field trip to the professional software development team at Hunter Industries in San Marcos, CA. This is a live action event - the kids code side-by-side with the professional programmers for TWO HOURS. In school, these kids have been learning Java one hour per day, for the entire year prior to this trip. They've coded with TKPJava and done Android development.

The kids broke into groups of 5 and then each group of kids joined a production group of developers. They LOVED coding (in Javascript or Python or Java) with pro devs, some kids even got to work on production code. All teams coded via the Hunter mob programing style. Shown below is one team, working on a javascript challenge.

Contemplating

In addition to leading TKP, I am also a professional developer and cloud architect. In my professional work I engage with developer teams from all around the world. Today's team, in the picture at the top of this article, looks like the general population, but, sadly, it looks different from the majority of the software teams that I work with - those teams are typically 80% or greater men between 25-35 years of age.

One example, from a tech conference, is shown below - can you spot me in the picture?

What does your team look like? What are you going to do to offer a bridge to the next generation of coders?