5 Reasons Why Mom Bloggers should Start Coding Python

Baca Juga

The technology industry has been recognized as an unfriendly environment for women. Women are underrepresented in technology industry globally. Some statistics clearly demonstrates this situation.

In Google, the second most valuable company in the world, only 30% of its engineers are women. This figure is generally similar to other big tech companies. The number of females who reach executive positions plummeted to only 11%.

The disparity is not only in term of workforce and executive quantity but also the number of salaries and startups led by women.

Tech start-up companies founded by women are only 15% from all start-ups in the United States of America (USA). Women-led startups are having more difficulty to access funding from investors than their counterparts.

Moreover, only 28% of females who hold computer science degrees. This is contrary to the general statistics where there are more women than men are successfully achieved a bachelor's degree.

One major issue for women in tech is unfavorable maternity leave policies. They need more flexible approaches so that they can return from leave with a smoother transition.

Another concern needed to be addressed is the establishment of an attentive scheme to ensure women get an equal opportunity to be promoted to leadership positions.

The technology industry is starting to recognize and act on this problem, but the progress is disappointingly slow.

 It has been stressed out that pipeline is not the main issue, but without new women to join tech industry this problem will last forever. What's more, alternative pipelines are needed than only relying on fresh graduates. Women with steady passive income like mom bloggers are perfect candidates to close the gap in tech industry.

Several movements have been initiated to improve the gender equality in this industry. Girls in Tech (GIT), Women Who Code and MotherCoders are a few examples of campaigns to overcome the under-representations of women in technology workforce.

Their success story page provides insights of many women who were able to enter or advancing tech jobs after pausing their career for motherhood. Some of them even opt to build a startup and became an entrepreneur.

If you have a reason why learn to code, the next questions are what language and how mom bloggers should learn to code? We can look back to the success story page of MotherCoders website. They learned various programming languages and frameworks. HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rail, Swift, and Python are skills they gained and make them successful.

If there are many options of programming languages, why must we choose Python? In the following sections I will show you five reasons why Python is the perfect language for you to learn. By the end of this post, I will provide one way to learn this language easily.

1. Python is easy to learn

Python is a programming language that so similar to plain English. You won't find tedious declarations in its syntax. Unlike other languages, Python doesn't use 'noisy' symbols, like semicolon and curly brackets, that generally baffled beginners.

Moreover, its so easy to setup. Python can be installed on Mac, Windows or Linux and it comes with the standard IDE called IDLE. Once you installed it, you can start writing Python code on IDLE without needing any hustle. As your coding skill getting better, you can start trying a better Python IDE that comfort you.

My favorite feature in Python is errors appear on runtime. I found that this is absolutely advantageous for beginners.

We make mistakes when we learn to code. And beginners make a lot more mistakes than advance learners. When you make a nasty error, Python doesn't just displaying a blank screen. Python gives you an explicit clue where the code went wrong. Python keeps on running your program, indicates where the bug is and help you troubleshoot it.

2. Python has great communities

Even if you decide to be a self taught Python, you can't work alone all the time. You need help from more experienced programmers. When you create a buggy program and copy the error message to Google, you'll meet dozens or hundreds of Python experts who already answer a similar problem faced by another learner.

Your learning journey will be much easier if you join online or offline communities in your city. More importantly, Python has communities exclusively for women. If you are new to Python, you must join PyLadies and if you continue to become a web developer by using Python you should join Django Girls.

If you can't find any Python community in your area, you can create one and invite other mom bloggers to join. You can also join Python community forum via Facebook group, Telegram group, Slack or others.

By joining online or offline communities, you won't only receive technical assistance but also valuable information such as free eBook, free Udemy coupons, upcoming meetups, latest YouTube videos and many more.

3. Python is great to work with text

When we talk about starting to learn to code, our imagination is filled with sophisticated math formula or complicated algorithm. This thought would surely make us hesitant to learn programming.

In fact, programming is not merely about intricate numerical computation. People are using programming to process textual data. Text mining and text manipulation is booming and used to make a better decision in finance, eCommerce, healthcare, media, manufacturing and other sectors.

They categorize, extract entities and perform sentiment analysis over large volumes of unstructured data. As a result, they gain better insights, patterns and trends.

Bioinformatics is another field that utilize programming to process textual data. Biologists need the power of programming languages to tackle the explosion of biological data and complexity of problems they want to address.

Building chatbots is also an application of programming that deal heavily with text. And this is absolutely fascinating for mom bloggers. Chatbot is a great tool to get more engagement with your readers and bring more conversions.

Chatbot is a piece of program that harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) that can simulate a conversation with human users over internet. This is an automated system of communication that brings costumers closer to us.

Python is a programming language with great capabilities to process textual data. If you use Python to analyze what articles that readers really want and embed a chatbot to your blog, you wouldn't spent thousands of dollars to buy different applications or plugins. 

4. You can teach Python to your kids

So you want to spend some quality time with your children, and why don't you teach them Python. Because Python is easy to learn, it is also easy to teach it to pupils. You don't have to be an expert first, just learn a few chapters ahead of your kids.

This is exactly what happened to me when I learned this language. After I finished "Learn Python The Hard Way" book, I found a book titled "Teach Your Kids To Code". I used this book to teach my son Python even thought I was still a beginner.

Having quality time with your children while learning a new knowledge is truly a rewarding activity. What's more rewarding, he has an alternative activity during school holiday rather than playing games and watch TV.

In addition, coding Python has become one of the regular conversation topics between my son and me. This programming thing, has brought us closer as a family.

5. You can build a startup with Python

As a successful mom blogger, you won't learn a programming language to pursue a job. You don't need a job, you've already had passive incomes. Instead, you can create a new passive income from your programming skill.

That's right, you can start your own startup company by using Python. Company that able to delivers chatbot to customers is in high demand. You can also build a new blog with all capabilities like traffic and SEO analysis, email marketing integration, chatbot without paying expensive plugins that you are now using.

E-commerce, social media, fin-tech, ed-tech are other areas that you can jump in with your startup. However, these fields are more competitive, and you must be able to build a strong team with different expertise. And if you are successful building startups, you can step up to be an angel investor. It is something that is really needed by women in tech across the globe.

How to learn Python from scratch

Now, if you are fascinated to learn Python, you might have one last question in your mind, how to learn Python step by step? There are only three major steps that you have to take to be able to code Python. Here are three steps of learning Python:

1. Learn the basic of Python.
2. Learn object oriented programming in Python.
3. Choose a project to enhance your coding skill.

I recommend that you follow two to three tutorials in each step. If you need more motivation, try to join a coding challenge. And when you face a hard time learning to code, you can count on me that finally you will find AHA moment.