Published on August 14th, 2015
By Rachel Jefferson

Dream It, Code It is an amazing organization whose goal is to inspire a passion for coding in Santa Barbara girls of all ages. The program hosts camps to teach girls Scratch coding; they make their own video games and animations, as well as explore careers in technology by visiting local businesses. This week, AppFolio had the honor of hosting approximately 20 of these young girls, and it was an absolute blast!

CTO Jon Walker kicked it off by sharing what engineering and technology mean to him. Like many of these young coders, Jon wrote his first program by around the sixth grade. “It’s a great field to be introduced to at such a young age,” Jon shared with the group. “It doesn’t matter what profession you’re going into in the future, technology touches all industries.”

 

During their visit, the girls also heard stories from other AppFolio engineers on why they chose careers in coding, took a tour to see engineering in action, and had a chance to ask plenty of questions. When asked what they thought of the day there were a couple themes that stood out to them: collaboration and office culture.

I liked how the office was open and how everyone was so interactive with each other.
—Zoe W.

It looks really fun to work at AppFolio because you get to work in a group.
—Rubi F.

I really liked the oars on the wall and how everyone signed them after every achievement!
—Amelia M.

I really liked how they all work together as a family.
—Gelsey R.

One of my favorite things was listening to them explaining how they got to their jobs and what school they went to and what they studied.
—Audrey M.

I liked seeing the different groups and themes.
—Shea W.

It was very different from regular offices!
—Sera Q.

I really liked that they had a lot of freedom, like they could bring a dog to work. One person even had a fish on her desk!
—Sarah Z.

It was exciting to witness the passion for technology and creativity these young coders share with each other and with our own AppFolio team.

“I was excited to give these girls some insight into how awesome it can be to build software,” says Sarah Jones, Senior Software Engineer. “The sum of many small experiences, like an older student taking a couple hours to teach me about a new technology, helped me get to where I am today; it feels good to think that maybe we’ll be one of those small experiences for some of these girls.”

 

Bryce Boe, a Senior Software Engineer at AppFolio, had a personal connection to the day’s event. “I was involved with a similar summer camp at UCSB during my Ph.D program, and while organizing this AppFolio event I was ecstatic to discover that Dream It, Code It co-founder Anna Brewer was one of those campers. Anna is one example of the fruit borne partially by outreach work like this and with co-founder Maria DeAngelis is now planting seeds of her own. Anna, Maria, and all of their young campers have extremely bright futures.”

And we can’t wait to see what amazing things these girls create in the future—perhaps they’ll be sporting one of our AppFolio shirts someday? We definitely hope so!

Check out some more highlights from the day.